2025/01/01 by Peter Jeffrey Katz · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Philosophical Ethics and Theory #Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.5840/jpd202611630
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/01/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
This paper draws on neuroethics and analytic philosophy to critique the relationship between autism, empathy, and morality. Damian Milton’s double-empathy problem presents a problem for empathy research: if autistic people experience empathy differently than neurotypical people, then even if they experience the moral part of empathy, neurotypical researchers might not recognize it. This paper posits that the double-empathy problem redoubles through the rhetorical elision of kinds of empathy, coupled with the received idea that empathy entails or leads to prosocial and fundamentally moral behavior. This is not only a conceptual error, but in practice often leads to the unjust conclusion that autistic people lack full access to morality. Through an interrogation of which kinds of empathy are necessary or sufficient for morality, this paper proposes that the moral component of empathy emerges as an embodied motive or affect—one to which autistic people have full access.