Moral reasoning in AS

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All murder causes harm weather it is intentional or not. Deliberate murders are far worse than unintentional.
self defense or protecting a loved one is not morally wrong. You should not do this unless absolutely necessary and try other ways to protect yourself first.
I knew that a killing someone in a car accidental is not intentional and that person is not a killer. That person is responsible but is not a bad person.
When a person walks into a bar a kills three men out of pure hatred that is a deliberate murder and is far worse than an accidental murder.
That is a killer and a danger to others.
I know what is morally right. Maybe the AS people you talked to were confused.

I'm emotionally detached from any form of malice. If someone purposely does something harmful to another person for no reason, I have no emotional reaction whatsoever. Logically, I think that person should be put in jail or killed or otherwise prevented from repeating their actions, but it gets no emotional response. On the other hand, if someone hurts another person accidentally as a result of carelessness or anything else which I consider to have been foreseeable and preventable, I get very upset at their stupidity.

I try to be fairly aware of intent, and my initial reaction to the questions is that accidental killing is not the same as murder, but that there should still be accountability for the outcome, whatever that may be.

This study is interesting to me in comparison to real-world reactions to children's deaths.

On the one hand, you have parents who space out and forget about their children, leaving them in vehicles on hot days, which leads to the child's death. My understanding of this as well as my own tendency to completely forget about things leads me to understand that this is a horrifying and traumatic experience for these parents - they weren't being careless or neglectful, but their brains had a glitch and they forgot a particular step (for example, forgetting that they did not drop their child off at day care, or forgetting they had the child to drop off at daycare). But these parents tend to be torn apart in the court of public opinion.

By comparison, you have parents who murder their disabled children, do so deliberately, admit to doing so deliberately and explaining why, and they often receive an outpouring of sympathy for their plight, often with little concern for the fact that a child is dead for no better reason than they had a disability.

Now, it seems to me that these reactions are largely informed by NTs, and it makes me wonder that it's so easy to reduce autistic adults to "can't morally distinguish between intent or lack of intent with a bad outcome" and NTs to "can morally distinguish between intent or lack of intent with a bad outcome." It seems that intent doesn't even matter compared to perceived circumstances.

I honestly don't know if there's any tendency for autistic adults to judge the first set of parents harshly, but the majority of what I've read about the second set comes from autistic bloggers.

Ettina, if you want or need, I can try to dig up more information on this. It seems somewhat relevant to the question under discussion.

I read these papers. Only the free cup/extra dollar one made sense to me. Machery says intent depends on ability but that means in the shooting example you create a gradient of intent between klutz and marksman, when they're all earnestly intending and achieving the same thing. So that's silly.

OP example doesn't match my experience either. I think they're leaping with inadequate data.

I think that the death penalty is morally wrong and should be considered murder.It is the same exact thing as murder and the government should focus on rehabilitating the prisoners. I also think abortion is murder because a fetus is alive and will soon develop into a human life.

Another thing I find interesting is that autistic reasoning is considered wrong even when conclusions are correct.

And I mean, okay, I don't think the reasoning is necessarily wrong, it simply doesn't take the same things into account that an NT would.

For example, an acquaintance of mine wrote a first person story about murdering people in various ways. My response was "I realized you had to be writing fiction when I got to the part about the viewpoint character driving" and her response was "I write a story about murdering people and you only know it wasn't me because I can't drive?"

I didn't literally think she was killing people until I came to that realization. I figured it was fiction from the start and the driving thing amused me. But that does reflect how I sometimes reason out social situations. My reasoning is not incorrect, it simply does not always take other people's internal states into consideration. I suspect it would be characterized as incorrect because I do not always take other people's internal states into consideration.

I think that tendency to simply characterize autistic reasoning as wrong, even when it leads to the correct conclusions reflects an inability on the researchers' part to understand autistic perspectives. The NT perspective is the correct perspective and any deviation is simply wrong.

Ettina, I couldn't find a link in your original post. How many people were in this study? How in the **** can they possibly make any conclusions from this study? First, if I understand this correctly, the subjects were told that the packet was either sugar or poison, right? Any fool knows all of it's sugar because actual poison wouldn't go over with the review board. I probably wouldn't mess with the intent of the experiment but I can't guarantee my ex wouldn't because the experiment is absurd. Yes, he's an aspie. If there was a possibility that actual poison was involved neither of us would participate. My ex, by the way, has a very keen sense of ethics. The scary thing is that anyone could generalize a relatively small sample in a flawed study to all people with ASD.

In the Jack experiments I don't know how long it would take me to get past the absurdity of it all, but Jack did in fact deliberately kill his aunt. In the second experiment the bullet hit the bulls eye.

The death penalty is state-sanctioned murder.

On the other hand, the question of abortion must necessarily go beyond considerations about the fetus, since it grows inside someone else's body, and that someone else really should be able to decide whether or not to carry a fetus to term. But it goes beyond that too: If you outlaw abortion, then people will still seek them through other means. Often, those other means can be dangerous or lethal. Also, if a fetus must be saved at all costs, these costs will sometimes include the mother's life. Opposing abortion is not a simple "I am for life" stance. If anything, it is for a particular set of potential lives, sometimes at the expense of other actual lives.

Sorry, you're right, my post makes no sense. Don't put me on a jury! Can't SAY what I mean today.

With the original wording I say it would be intentional, but with this wording it's unintentional, though he is still guilty as he killed her and he shouldn't have been pointy his gun at her in the first place.

Maybe a case of what I like to call "mental dyslexia." I screw up my logic sometimes so badly, but just cannot see it in the moment. I'll see it again a lot later and "What the hell was I thinking?"

Now that I found the study the OP was referring to, it didn't take too long to dismiss the idea of looking very deeply into it. How come the stories and/or questions the subjects were asked are not there?

I've seen those evil things before, and they are a lot like the stupid friggin' questions they put in job screening tests. Convoluted twisted wording designed to mess you up. They never ask you WHY you give the answers you give. If they did, our explanations might explain a lot and destroy the conclusions they reach.

Most of us know the Sally-Anne test. I gave that to my sons, and even though two of the three of them got the answer supposedly "wrong," once I asked them to explain why they gave their answer, their answers both made perfectly logical sense.

I looked up the Sally Anne test, I never heard of it before. Well my answer was the "wrong" one. But here's my reasoning, Sally would look around for her ball once she realized it wasn't where she left it, and the next obvious place to look would be the other container next to the one where she left it. What is she going to do, keep looking in the place where she left the ball even after she realizes it is not there?

I used to be very critical about parents leaving their kids in the car and always thought it was intentional. Sure I could understand why death be an accident because people are stupid so they use poor common sense and not realize that a hot car means death. Then my thoughts changed when I was at Babycenter and people posted stories about parents accidentally leaving their kids in the car and I read an article about it on Washington Post and it explained very well how parents could forget.

I was thinking of an article on Washington Post when I wrote that bit - it talked about a few specific cases, and discussed how these things happen.

Although I do not wish to drag this thread into the realm of thoughtcrime and hot-headed philosophy debates, is it not true that the true wrong is in the intention to commit the crime? This requires a distinction between legal wrong and moral wrong. I believe that the desire to commit the crime alone is already morally wrong but cannot be legally enforced without overstepping basic ethics. What is legally wrong is the successful completion of the action itself, because that is what is visible and inflicts the intended harm. Currently, I do not see a practical way of resolving the differences between moral wrong and legal wrong without establishing the existence of higher law or removing the liberty of thought.

[I can only hope my two cents are not as explosive as they usually are. I will purge the post if that is required to keep the discussion centered on the psychology of moral behavior.]