Judging from the extensive treatment that Adam Smith gave to sympathy in The Moral Sentiments, he viewed it as one of the more important passions. However, he also viewed sympathy as an extremely unreliable guide to moral behavior, sometimes falling short and sometimes exceeding what is morally required. Smith argued that natural sympathy often falls short of what is morally justified by mass misery. In one evocative passage he noted the striking lack of sympathy that a resident of Europe would be likely to have of an earthquake that eliminated the population of China. After expressing “very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people,” Smith (1759, III, iii, 192–193) commented, such an individual would likely “pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility as if no such accident had happened....If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren.” In other cases, Smith believed that people experience sympathy that is completely out of proportion to the plight of the individual one feels sympathetic toward. Smith adds dryly that “we sympathize even with the dead,” who themselves experience nothing. If humans were under the control of their passions, one could expect to observe extreme callousness alternating with remarkable generosity, with little logic or consistency governing the transitions. Returning to the case of devastation in China, Smith (1759, III, iii, 192) asks whether his representative European would be willing to “sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren” to save the injury to his little finger. Smith concludes that the answer is “No”: “Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it.” The impartial spectator recognizes (194) that “we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it.”