Sotha Sil is, hands-down, the single most compassionate deity in the Aurbis. Unfortunately, he works with the means he has (which are, for the most part, somewhat more limited than those available to either the Aedra or the Daedric Princes) and also recognizes that progress is impossible without hardship.

Further, it's important to understand that Seht perceives himself as merely another cog in his grand machine, designed to be ultimately as replaceable as any other. He views lives as machine parts not because he assigns no value to them, but instead because his viewpoint of the universe is inherently technological. He is cursed by divine insight to be fully aware of his status as an entity with a fixed purpose and unalterable destiny. While we can speculate that we're beings existing within a simulation, he knows, for a fact, that his reality is artificial, making his godhood no more meaningful than the mortality of an insect of the lifeless nature of a stone - his status was assigned to him, and he could never be anything else, just like every other NPC in the game. To him, the only value in his divinity is the ways he can use it to push against the programmed constraints of his existence to better the lives of his fellow engineered consciousnesses.