Modern conscience condemns pain without approved instrumental reason, defining cruelty

Evidence

Rejali does not explain why, unlike discipline, modern state use of torture requires the rhetoric of denial. The brief answer to this question, surely, is that there is now a new sensibility regarding physical pain. Although it occurs frequently enough in our time, the modern conscience regards the inflicting of pain “without good reason” (to perform a medical operation, say, or to slaughter animals for meat) as reprehensible, and therefore as an object of moral condemnation. It is this attitude to pain that helps define the modern notion of cruelty. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 513

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines modern cruelty as pain inflicted without good reason, where ‘good reason’ is instrumental and state-specified — a key cleaving of modern from religious moral vocabularies.
• XREF: The ‘controlled pain for sanctioned ends’ logic parallels how modern secular states justify violence as legitimate in ways they deny to religious actors — the Cooper/Asad bridge on coded privilege.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the legitimate-pain allowance (surgery, slaughter) implicitly license state violence while delegitimizing the pain religious practice involves (self-mortification, martyrdom)?