Our moral discourse on cruelty is inseparable from legal and political categories

Evidence

I want to stress that I am making no moral judgment here. My concern is simply to identify the paradoxes of modern thought and practice that relate to the deliberate infliction of pain in conflicts between states as well as within them. If I focus on state-condoned cruelty this is not because I assume that the state is its only source today, but because our moral discourse about cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment is closely linked to legal concepts and political interventions. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 578

Categorization

• XREF: Methodological stance parallels Milgrom’s institutional analysis — describing the structural logic without moralizing, letting mechanism speak.
• SHARE: For a friend studying the legal philosophy of CRPD (Convention Against Torture): Asad’s argument that moral language about cruelty is structurally legal from the start.