Smith claims that over time a man who suffers a great misfortune such as losing a leg gradually comes to adopt the view of the impartial spectator and recovers his natural tranquility, with the man who struggles least and most readily acquiesces recovering soonest—paralleling the phenomenon of lottery winners and quadriplegics returning to baseline—but Roberts pushes back that this is a huge leap of empirical faith for tragedies like losing a child, and that Smith, who had no children, may exhibit hubris here.