War cruelty is reconciled with pain-sensitivity by quantifying pain

Evidence

So how can the calculated cruelties of modern battle be reconciled with the modern sensibility regarding pain? Precisely by treating pain as a quantifiable essence. As in state torture, an attempt can be made to measure the physical suffering inflicted in modern warfare in accordance with the proportionality of means to ends. That is the principle supported by the Geneva Convention. The principle states that the human destruction inflicted should not outweigh the strategic advantage gained. Only necessary punishment of noncombatants should be used. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 573

Categorization

• DEFINE: Identifies the Geneva Convention’s proportionality principle as the conceptual bridge that lets modern states reconcile battle cruelty with civilized aversion to pain.
• XREF: This is the moral-framework question from Milgrom’s law-merchant work inverted: where trade needed reputation institutions, wartime law needs proportionality metrics. — connects to: Casting someone as a moral agent reduces perceived sensitivity to pain — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 88
• DEEPTHINKING: ‘Treating pain as a quantifiable essence’ is a dense paradigm claim — suffering is rendered as a measurable substance to legitimize its infliction. Sits at the intersection of biopolitics, ethics, and epistemology.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 573