Secular modernity distinguishes punishable gratuitous pain from necessary pain toward becoming fully human.

Evidence

Clearly, then, in the cause of secular progress there was suffering and suffering. What is interesting, I think, is not merely that some forms of suffering were to be taken more seriously than others, but that “inhuman” suffering as opposed to “necessary” or “inevitable” suffering was regarded as being essentially gratuitous, and therefore legally punishable. Pain endured in the movement toward becoming “fully human,” on the other hand, was necessary, in the sense that there were social or moral reasons why it had to be suffered. This view is of a piece with the post-Enlightenment concern to construct through judicial punishment the most efficient means of reforming offenders and of guarding society’s interests. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 549

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between ‘inhuman’ gratuitous suffering and ‘necessary’ developmental suffering — where the latter is redeemed by its telos of becoming fully human — is a dense, paradigm-level insight about how secular legal regimes legitimize some pain while criminalizing other pain.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s discipline and punishment, and to the concept that progress itself licenses suffering in the name of a future redemption.

Related

• Secular progress distinguished punishable gratuitous pain from necessary pain toward humanity. (similarity 0.95)
• Humanizing societies do not simply expand which pains they deem unacceptable (similarity 0.82)
• Secular conscience cannot make positive sense of suffering as Christianity once did (similarity 0.80)
• Humanizing societies have not steadily expanded the range of morally condemned pain (similarity 0.79)
• The secular cruelty standard depends on comparing incommensurable sufferings (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial discourse distinguished offensive suffering from redemptive, necessary pain. (similarity 0.78)