Mercy in "Sex and Social Justice"

p. 166
The merciful attitude, as Seneca develops it, entails regarding each particular case as a complex narrative of human effort in a world full of obstacles. The merciful judge will not fail to judge the guilt of the offender, but she will also see the many obstacles this offender faced on the way to being just - as a member of a culture, a gender, a city or country, and, above all, as a member of the human species, facing the obstacles characteristic of human life in a world of scarcity and accident. The starting point is a genearl view of human life and its difficulties, but the search for mitigating factors must at every point be searchingly particular.
The narrative/ medical attitude asks the judge to imagine what it was like to have been that partiuclar aoffender facing those particular obstacles iwth the resources of that history.