Immoral or criminal autistic people need to stop blaming their autism for their immoral or criminal acts. Just as Nick Starr-Street didn’t harass black women because of his autism, Jason Berlin didn’t rape a woman because of his autism. Of lesser import but still important, however, is that autistic people need to stop talking about an allegedly strong sense of right and wrong that somehow emerges from being autistic.
This is especially true when we’re younger. For example, when I was in fourth grade I printed up a broadsheet about how my classmates were sliding into juvenile delinquency by saying things “sucked” because my parents had forbidden me to say it.
You’ll note just from this example that the notion of what’s right and what’s wrong is highly dependent upon perspective. Is saying the word “sucked” actually wrong, or just contrary to the rules as established by parental authority figures? What’s dangerous, therefore, about this purported autistic morality is that the very person Zack Budryk is arguing should not blame his autism for his having raped someone could tell a similar story in which the authority figures in his life established a right and a wrong when it came to sex, and placed rape on the “right” side. We autistic people don’t somehow innately have a stronger sense of morality. Rather, what we often have is a rigid adherence to rules, and this is what’s happening in Budryk’s own anecdote. If the rules are morally corrupt (or just ludicrously misconstrued, as in Budryk’s story), our rigid adherence to them will be as well. I’ve gone after this sort of thing before, this idea of autistic “superpowers”, and an enhanced sense of right-and-wrong often gets listed as one. It’s wrong, and it’s misguided. A rigid adherence to the rules established by whatever moral authority had influence over our development only amounts to moral behavior if the rules we learned are moral. Just because it sometimes happens that those rules are moral, and we rigidly adhere to them, apply them, and try to enforce them in the world around us, doesn’t mean we have some sort of magic moral sense. Nick Star-Street, lamentably, probably does really believe his own bullshit. He likely believes it was only ever about having glass bottles by the pool where he lived, and about his righteous sense of right and wrong. Whether or not Jason Berlin really believes his own (or his lawyer’s) bullshit, I won’t hazard a guess. The rest of us, however, we should know better than to open the door to exactly the sort of defense Budryk says is not just untenable but morally wrong. It’s time to retire the myth of Autistic Morality.