The secular cruelty standard depends on comparing incommensurable sufferings

Evidence

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

• DEEPTHINKING: Asad locates a deep aporia: modern ‘humane’ punishment claims an objective metric of suffering that philosophically cannot exist across qualitatively different experiences, yet the entire torture/human-rights distinction rests on it.
• XREF: This quantitative-cruelty frame is exactly the universalist ‘neutrality’ Asad argues smuggles in particular historical norms — corroborates the Cooper bridge that secular-liberal claims of neutrality encode specific European Christian inheritances.
• SEED: A possible essay thread: the unexamined assumption that all pain is commensurable underlies both liberal penal reform and Western judgments that some religious practices (flogging) are ‘inhumane’ while its own (isolation, drones) are not.