The Ethics of Autism: Among Them, but Not of Them

3 Autism and Moral Theories

Autismand MoralTheories The previous chapter considered the moral status of the person with autism.Whatroledoesthepersonwithautismhaveinthemoralcommunity , given that he is cut off from other persons in a fundamental way, and what do theories about well-lived human lives tell us about the lives of persons with autism? These questions are precursors to questions about what persons who do not have autism morally owe those who do, and what individuals with autism can reasonably be expected to owe those without autism. Questions about what we owe other persons, and what they owe us, are answered by moral theories that consider the rightness and wrongness of actions. Thus, an investigation of the applicability of different moral theories to the autistic individual is the next step in an inquiry into the ethics of autism. Canautisticindividualshaveamoralsenseatall?Shouldwespeak of moral theories’ applicability to individuals who do not recognize moral dilemmas, and cannot distinguish moral questions from other types of questions? Given that ought implies can, if autistic individuals are not able to recognize moral questions when confronted with them, then autistic individuals cannot be required to act in keeping with any moral theory. Two types of evidence present themselves in favor of the claim that some autistic individuals do have a moral sense. The first is anecdotal evidence: plenty of autistic individuals evidence moral concerns. The anecdotal evidence—being anecdotal, after all—is too wide-ranging to systematically categorize. Frith, for example, cites examples of persons with autism who are recognized as not merely having a strong moral sense, but in some cases were recognizedasmoralexemplars .Frithrecountsstoriesofthetwelfth-century 110 • The Ethics of Autism Franciscan monk, Brother Juniper, a historical figure who seemed to have many traits associated with autism, but who was also recognized as a paradigm of piety, humility, and selflessness (Frith 2003). Second, at least two studies support the claim that persons with autism do make moral distinctions. One study was conducted by R. James R. Blair (Blair 1996). Blair ran an experiment with four groups of ten children each: ten typically developing children, ten with moderate learning difficulties, ten children with autism who were able to pass two false-belief tests, and ten children with autism unable to pass the two false-belief tests. Blair’s experiment involved presenting the children with a set of vignettes, to see if the children could tease out the distinction between violating moral transgressions, such as “a childhittinganotherchild,”andwhatBlairdescribedas“conventional” transgressions, such as “a boy child wearing a skirt” (Blair 1996, 572). Blair found that “the children with autism made a distinction between moral and conventional transgressions in their judgments . . . [and] that the level of ability on false-belief tasks is not associated with the tendency to distinguish moral and conventional transgressions; even the least able of the groups of children with autism were recognizing the moral/conventional distinction” (Blair 1996, 577). Psychologists may be unsatisfied with the study because it was comparatively small; philosophers may be unsatisfied with the moral/conventional distinction, as well as the examples that were used to illustrate the distinction.1 In a second study, Cathy M. Grant, Jill Boucher, Kevin J. Riggs, and Andrew Grayson compared a group of nineteen children with autism spectrum disorders (seventeen with autism, two with Asperger’s syndrome), seventeen children with “moderate learning difficulties” (MLD), and a typically developing control group on both judgments of moral culpability as well as justifications for those judgments (Grant et al. 2005). The children in the study were given six pairs of vignettes, and were asked of the agents in each story, “Which one of these two children is the naughtier?” After receiving the answer , the study subjects were then asked, “Why? Why do you think that X is the naughtier?” Grant et al. examined whether children with autism were more inclined to make moral judgments on the basis of agents’ motives or on the basis of the consequences of actions, as well Autism and Moral Theories • 111 as whether children with autism were more inclined to view harms to other persons as more significant than harms to non-persons. Grant et al. found that “All [three of] the groups based their judgments on the motive of the protagonist” (Grant et al. 2005, 322), favoring deontological intuitions over consequentialist ones. Further, “All three groups judged damage to people to be more serious than damage to property” (Grant et al. 2005, 322). However, when presenting the three groups with more...