Modern anti-torture categories are historically particular despite their universal framing
Evidence
Moral and legal judgments that derive from this rule have an interesting history in the West, to which I shall advert in what follows. I want to advance the thesis that this universal rule covers a wide range of qualitatively different kinds of behavior. More precisely, I shall try to make four connected points: First, that the modern history of “torture” is not only a record of the progressive prohibition of cruel, inhuman, and degrading practices. It is also part of a secular story of how one becomes truly human. The second point is this: The phrase “torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” is intended to provide a cross-cultural criterion for making moral and legal judgments about pain and suffering. Yet it is given much of its operative sense historically and culturally. My third point is linked to the first two. It is that the new ways of conceptualizing suffering (which include “mental torture” and “degrading treatment”) and sufferer (a term that now refers also to nonhumans and even to the natural environment) are increasingly universal in scope but particular in prescriptive content. The fi- nal point is that the modern dedication to eliminating pain and suffering often conflicts with other commitments and values: the right of individuals to choose, and the duty of the state to maintain its security. … Together, these four points aim at underscoring the unstable character of a central category deployed in modern, secular society. The instability relates, in brief, to the fact that the ideas of torture, cruelty, inhumanity, and degrading treatment are intended to measure what are often incommensurable standards of behavior. Perhaps most important, the idea of measured behavior is subverted by ideas of excess that come from other secular discourses. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 488
Categorization
- DEFINE: Asad’s core thesis defining the instability of torture/cruelty categories - they claim universal measure but carry particular secular-prescriptive content.
- XREF: This parallels Cooper’s claim that ‘secular’ policy categories quietly encode particular Christian-imbued norms while claiming neutrality. Also resonates with Asad’s own Formations-of-the-Secular thesis that putatively universal categories of liberal modernity are historically and culturally particular.