Thesis on Morality & Autism Spectrum Disorders

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No, I meant the physics after that, escape velocities and such. By the time that started, the thread had strayed quite a way from the subject line it was supposed to be about.

I wouldn't put it as strongly as that. More like "hang on folks, have we noticed what this could look like?" Anything stronger could be control freakery. I think it would be too late now anyway. Might be a tad hard for interested people to find it though, with a subject title like "Thesis on Morality & Autism Spectrum Disorders."

Again, you overestimate my desire to restrict. Trolley problems aren't the only part of the thesis or the only part of the questionnaire. There was a bit that seemed to be about identifying with neighbours, nations and the world.

No, it sounds like an interesting thing to discuss, and it's relevent to the thread. But what is there to say about it except that the scenarios are highly unlikely ones?


Well, if those 3 "if's" are untrue of me, as I've said they are, then I assume I'm free to do that. And if they'd been true, you'd not have wanted me to post anything about whether or not fat people can be pushed under trains to stop them. I never really doubted your opinion that they can't, but I don't understand why you didn't want me to say so. Oh I see, you mean it would have been inconsistent of me, because I'd have been doing the very thing I was recommending we didn't do? Well, it was like this: a number of us were going off topic, I caught myself doing it, saw a possible danger in it, floated the idea, and that was about all.


I likely made too much of the risk in this particular case. And sure it's all clever stuff. I've not seen much OT stuff in the other places I've been, though I've not been to many. Not sure that autistic people don't have a particular problem staying on subject though. We've had good threads here about tangent monsters.

That explains a lot, thanks.

Seemingly implausible things do happen in real life, like the ordeal faced by the flight crew of British Airways flight 5390, but impossible things don't happen. A car won't stop a runaway train and neither will a human body of any size, even if the train was moving very slowly. If you have real examples of anything like this occurring, outside of the stories of large religious organizations which have to be taken on faith, I would be very interested in hearing about them.

I find your reasoning unconvincing in this case.

I still don't know if the moral dilemmas presented in the questionnaire will be a useful research tool for the thesis, but they've shown me something about myself and about this "morality" thing that's advanced my thinking. Until very recently, I didn't know what morality was, apart from the utilitarian idea of maximum happiness for the most people and a code of conduct designed to allow people to rub along together with minimum friction, and I'd even doubted it was a useful term at all. I'd heard that the trolley problem and its variants were supposed to show that morality is at least partly emotional and intuitive, but I hadn't seen the more emotionally charged variants. I figured pushing the fat man to his death to save 5 lives had to be the right thing to do, and suspected myself weak for thinking that maybe I couldn't do it.

On seeing the additional variants, I felt uncomfortable and couldn't answer them. I read about the subject and noticed that such experiments have been called "intuition pumps." That's when I realised why I'd felt so uncomfortable - of course moral logic dictates that the baby must be killed, but intuition dictates that I can't do that. So it's brought home to me that there really is an emotional dimension to morality, and more importantly, that I'm capable of feeling that dimension. As an autistic person, I have trouble seeing my emotions, and when I try, I have to fight a lifelong sense that they don't really exist, and progress has been slow. So it's good to have a relatively benign way of creating a strong tension between my logic and my intuition, because then I know that my feelings are real, and I'm more likely to recognise when there's a tension like that in real life between head and heart, so I'm more likely to be able to manage the situation wisely. Anything reasonably harmless that can help people climb out of alexithymia is worth a try.

I think they are meant, among other things, to make people aware of the incommensurability of human lives.

All of the problems only work if you don't take this problem into account.

Would you kill one person to save 5?

How about kill one person who is the world's best virologist and is working through an idea that can cure AIDS, Ebola and Marburg in order to save 5 presenters for a Rupert Murdoch media outlet?

How about kill the one person in the world who you are closest to in order to save 5 convicted violent pedophiles being transported to a maximum security prison?

Moral philosophy is complicated. I think they are relying on the badly formulated version of the trolley problem and fat man variation because they have been done before so they can compare new results with old. But that is a version of the spotlight effect, when the person looks for information in the wrong place because it's by far the easiest course.

In the case of autistics though, maybe they're thinking about how empathy affects morality?

The survey is now closed, but I'll say this: extreme utilitarian morality like this makes no sense as the value of a human life cannot be quantified. Everyone is unique and valuable in themselves. Five people is not greater than one as infinity times five is still infinite. People are not numbers. I'm not going to play God and decide who lives and who dies. Maybe on paper I might say I'd avert a trolley from five people to one, but If I was really faced with any of those situations, I wouldn't do any of them, as it wouldn't cross my mind to take a life in order to save one. Rather, I'd try to find a way to save both, even if it's impossible, like the spider and the butterfly.

(Though I might "smother" the baby, as in close it's mouth to keep it from screaming, and if I end smothering it it would be by accident and that would be too sad.)

I find it funny that movie takes place in an international school in Jakarta, while I actually went to an international school in Jakarta when that movie was released.

Anyway, what's this about an aspie being sacrificed?

Hang on. If you couldn't see her e-mail, then how did you know what it was in order to e-mail her? Did you tell Alex about this?

Yes, I'm very grateful that real life isn't at all likely to force such a decision on me. Nearest thing I've seen to it is in fiction. Jack Bauer, the hero in "24," kills a colleague when terrorists demand it, because the alternative is so much worse. Most real-life terrorism dilemmas at least have the option of doing nothing, and I believe that's been the default choice of most governments. It's still nothing like those rarified trolley / baby smothering dilemmas, but I think governments do "have to" play god sometimes.


That's an impressive coincidence

I should probably have been more verbose and said the sacrificed Aspie thing is open to interpretation.
Blink and you'll miss it: 46'57"
AFAIK they don't show him actually being sacrificed, and I only presume he's excluded from the bunker - I didn't notice any footage of him that clearly shows that - but given that they're still in utilitarian mode, and they're revealing "negatives" about themselves, I think the film is saying that he's excluded. The real weakness in my assumption is that his "positive" is purely artistic, he's a harper. But I don't think they wrote that "autistic spectrum disorder" line as an indifferent detail. There could be more about the guy in the movie, but my face-recognition is poor so I could have missed it.

Your thesis reminds me a lot of an episode of Brain Games that I recently watched. When I saw the episode, my only thought was, I probably would always choose to take no action. Why? Mostly because I am always slow to react to such split-second decisions. But, let’s say I had time to think through the pros/cons of the situation. I still probably would not alter my decision, unless the payback was really great (i.e. if I had to harm one person in order to prevent a nuclear bomb from exploding).

Although the test is now closed, I recognize many of the questions quoted and posted here as standard on tests to help determine whether or not somebody is a psychopath. Just FYI.

Well, the survey is now closed but from what I know about morality discussions and ASD empathy discussions, this was probably going to check if we were influenciated by the proximity to the person that is going to be killed (is. The guy we would have to push in front of the train) instead of using the "logical" option (ie. Number of lives)
There is, people usually choose to push the switch in the first situation because they think "1 dead better than 5", but in the other situations, even if it's the same logic, they can't do it because of the proximity with the person. She was probably going to asses if we were affected by this and to what extent.
I personally don't think I would have acted in any situation (supposing the situations are realistic) because I would not kill someone that would not otherwise die even if this would save lives (apart from a few extreme cases). This doesn't show much about morality I guess, only that I would be a terrible head of state they have to face those kinds of dilemmas all the time.

I watched this episode too first thing her questions reminded me.