Utilitarian calculus enables cross-cultural moral comparison of suffering

Evidence

It is not difficult to see how the utilitarian calculus of pleasure and pain has come to be central to cross-cultural judgment in modern thought and practice. For by a reductive operation the idea of a calculus has facilitated the comparative judgment of what would otherwise remain incommensurable qualities. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 529

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s core Cooper/Asad bridge: the ‘calculus of suffering’ is the same putatively neutral, universal metric by which Western modernity adjudicates Islam’s religious practices as backward.