Modern humane punishment rests on treating subjective suffering as objectively comparable.

Evidence

It is not Bentham’s apparent refusal to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary subjection to pain that should be noted here. It is the more interesting idea that subjective experiences of pain can be objectively compared. This idea is crucial for the modern understanding of “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” in a cross-cultural context, although liberals today would strongly reject Bentham’s view regarding the occasional preferability of torture to imprisonment. For it is precisely some notion of comparability in suffering that makes of long years in prison (including solitary confinement) a “humane” punishment and of flogging an “inhumane” one, even though the experience of imprisonment and of flogging are qualitatively quite different. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 524

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Asad’s broader study of secularism and to the reader’s interests in how categories like humane/inhumane get settled cross-culturally — parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece on how moral categories are deployed politically.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move of exposing how the modern humane/inhumane distinction itself depends on Bentham’s comparability-of-suffering calculus — which liberals reject — is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation.