As One is, So One Sees

Abstract

Sylvie Delacroix invites us to a new and deeper understanding of the role of such habituation in our daily lives. Her fine study offers keen insight into the operation of habit in our lives among others, its enabling and enhancing contributions to moral deliberation and judgment, and its potential for their distraction and distortion. My discussion here seeks not to fundamentally challenge her analysis, but to build upon it. I begin with a brief outline of her account, elaborating it a bit here and there. Then I put her account to work to deepen our understanding of the place of mercy in the criminal process, an institutional context of moral judgment in which habitual elements seem to play an important, if unacknowledged, role.

Keywords: Attention, criminal justice, deliberation, habit, mercy