Quan JinFirst draftDr. Stump: PHIL 626-01Apr 4, 2012

The Amoral Autistics?On Autism, Empathy, and Moral Agency

Unlike other animals, we humans are moral beings, capable of

moral thought and action. Upon this theorists agree. What they

debate about is the root of this moral nature. What constitutes our

moral agency? What in humans has given rise to this moral sensibility

that not found in other species of the animal kingdom? Answers to

these questions divide theorists into two main camps: Humeans (or

sentimentalism) and Kantians (or rationalism). Humeans emphasize

the role of emotion, empathy in particular; they believe it is the

empathetic concern for others that motivates and regulates the kind

of judgments we make and the way we act toward others. Kantians,

on the other hand, insist that our moral capacities have their sole

basis in our conforming to what reason dictates.

How are we to settle the debate? Recently moral philosophers

have been focusing on atypical cases, cases where impairment in

some cognitive and/or affective capacities seems to have compromised

one’s moral agency. Two populations of particular interest are

autistics and psychopaths. What is extraordinary about them is that

they both seem to lack empathy. Yet, autistics—at least those who are

considered high functioning—seem to preserve a relatively intact

moral sensibility despite the impairment, whereas psychopaths are

notoriously anti-social and amoral: they are indifferent to what we

take to be morally charged situations. It seems, then, that the case of

psychopathy favors a Humean or sentimentalist account of moral

agency, whereas the case of autism speaks against it. We are back to

where we started.

Revisiting these two cases, Victoria McGeer (2008) proposes a

way to explain the differences between autistics and psychopaths, and

endorses a broadly Humean account of moral agency. She identifies

three different moral concerns that she believes are operative in all

humans, and the way these concerns develop and interact in a given

person results in different varieties of moral agency. This paper is an

examination of this pluralistic account of moral agency McGeer

proposes. I will raise a few issues that I find worrisome in this

account. Anticipated replies will also be considered.

1. Some preliminaries

Some preliminary issues need to be addressed before we move

onto McGeer’s proposal. These are issues about the nature of

empathy, how to proceed in this debate, and a workable definition of

moral agency.

1.1 Empathy

What is this thing called empathy that we think is lacking in

both psychopaths and autistics? What kind of emotion is it? Is it an

emotion at all? To see the nature of the empathetic impairment in

psychopaths and autistics, we need to have good answers to these

questions. But the word “empathy” has been taken to mean a lot of

different things. C. Daniel Batson (2009), for instance, identifies eight

“conceptually distinct, stand-alone” psychological states that

philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have associated with

empathy.

I am not going to sort these debates out and give a complete

analysis of empathy. Instead, for my purpose, I will stick to McGeer’s

use of the term:

Empathy is “an other-regarding disposition toward feeling or being affectively moved by the emotional state of another, whether that state be distress, joy, anger, or whatever” (255).

Simply put, empathy is the tendency to respond affectively to

perceived emotions in others. So, in order to have this empathetic

responsiveness, two sets of abilities are essential: 1) basic mind-

reading abilities of recognizing others’ emotions from their facial

expressions, gestures, voices, body movement, etc.; and 2) being

affectively responsive (that is, these perceived emotions must be able

to trigger correlative emotions in the perceiver. “Correlative” here

means that the triggered emotions don’t have to be exactly the same

as the emotions perceived, but are causally linked in appropriate way;

in other words, perceived positive emotions (e.g., elation) must

trigger positive emotions (joy, excitement, etc.) in the perceiver, and

likewise for perceived negative emotions. For instance, if perceived

grief in others tends to trigger unalloyed delight in me, my empathetic

capacities must have been impaired in some way). Therefore,

empathetic impairment may be result from a deficiency either in

emotion recognition skills or in emotional responsiveness.

1.2 Particularism or methodism: a hybrid approach

It might be worried that, prior to addressing the issue of autistic

moral agency, we need to decide where we start first. That is, do we

want to be a “methodist,” first specifying the criterion for moral

agency and then seeing if autistics meet that criterion?1 Or, would we

rather proceed from bottom up as a “particularist” does, identifying

recognized instances of moral agents and then devising an account of

moral agency that would be inclusive enough to allow for all—or most

1 This methodism/particularism talk is borrowed from R. M. Chisholm. See Chisholm (1989) for his elaboration of “the problem of the criterion.”

(i.e., more than any other existing account can)—of those instances of

moral agents we have recognized?2

I do not plan to tackle the methodological issue involved here.

Nor am I going to argue for the hybrid approach that I prefer: namely,

starting up with both a workable, perhaps not very informative

conception of moral agency and our intuitions about whether autistics

count as moral agents, and then working to flesh out and/or modify

that conception, without begging the question. This seems to be the

approach McGeer and her target, Jeanette Kennett, have taken. They

both take it to be intuitively plausible that at least some high-

functioning autistics are moral agents, and their task is to give an

account of moral agency that would include autistics. The preliminary

definition of moral agency I am working with is adopted from McGeer

(2008: 227):

Moral agency is the ability to make moral judgments and act from specifically moral motivations or concerns.

Note that “moral” here does not imply “morally good or right;” it

means only that the judgments or actions at question are morally

relevant and show some sort of sensibility to or understanding of the

circumstances one find him- or herself in being morally charged. What

the nature of moral judgments is and what kind of motivations or

concerns count as specifically moral are to be filled out.3

2. McGeer’s pluralistic account of moral agency

2 For examples of the first approach, see Lisa Damm (2010).

3 Later in this paper, I will use “moral sensibility” or “moral capacities” to refer, roughly and generally, to the kind of ability required for moral agency. And when I talk about autistic moral agency or elaborate McGeer’s account, I have high-functioning autistic individuals in mind unless otherwise indicated.

2.1 Empathetic impairment in psychopaths and its impact

on their moral capacities

Both psychopaths and autistics are believed to be impaired in

empathetic responsiveness. But the impairments are of very different

nature, and also differ in their effects on moral capacities. The

psychopaths’ mindreading skills seem both remarkable and defective.

On the one hand, as McGeer reports, they seem adept at detecting

other people’s “beliefs and desires, motives and intentions, cares and

concerns,” as shown by standard and advanced false-belief tests. On

the other hand, they have trouble recognizing some emotions,

especially fear and sadness. In addition, they don’t have most

“reactive emotions” found in normally developing individuals,

particularly those “triggered by the suffering of others (remorse or

sympathy), condemnation by others (shame, embarrassment), or

attachment to others (love, grief).” (230) The etiology of their lack of

empathy, it seems, is complicated: partially due to difficulties in

emotion recognition and partially due to the missing link or pathway

between perceived emotions in others and their own emotions.

This notable deficit of psychopaths in empathetic capacities, as

has been suggested, explains their impaired moral capacities. One

alleged critical indicator of moral capacities is the ability to

distinguish moral from conventional transgressions, and psychopaths

fail to make such a distinction. In normal populations, conventional

transgressions are taken to be rule or authority dependent—i.e., they

are considered wrong only because they are proscribed by rules of

acceptable social behaviors—whereas moral transgressions, on the

other hand, are regarded as wrong, and more seriously so, because of

our strong “affective response” they provoke in us “to the victim’s

imagined distress.” (230-1) Since psychopaths seem affectively

immune to such distress, it is unsurprising that they tend to conflate

moral and merely conventional transgressions. So the case of

psychopathy seems to support a sentimentalist account of moral

agency, for the impaired moral capacities of psychopaths can be

explained by their lack of empathetic responsiveness.

2.2 Empathetic impairment in autistics and its impact on

their moral capacities

It has to be noted that individuals diagnosed as autistics are

handicapped in varying aspects and severity. In spite of this fact,

autistics show a triad of impairments in (1) reciprocal social

interactions, (2) nonverbal and verbal communication, and (3)

imaginative abilities. Since those at the low-end of the spectrum are

severely challenged in all sorts of ways, their moral agency seems out

of the question. So philosophers are mostly concerned with high-

functioning autistics, those who have “normal to high IQ, often good,

although characteristically abnormal language skills, and often

compensating cognitive strategies for coping with their autistic

disabilities.” (233)

Researchers have shown that autistics learn to distinguish

people from inanimate objects only at a very later age. Unlike

psychopaths, even high-functioning autistics have difficulties reading

people’s minds, their emotions, intentions, desires, and beliefs. They

have terrible perspective-taking skills, which is shown by standard

and advanced false-belief tasks. They tend to avoid eye contact, and

social interaction in general. Although a “talented minority” will

eventually pass the theory of mind tasks, this is most likely because,

as McGeer points out, they are “able to use their advanced reasoning

skills to ‘hack out’ a solution to the puzzle of other minds, even while

they continue to have no immediate or natural perception of others’

mental states” (239). Given these impairments, the lack of empathetic

capacities in autistics is predictable. For they have no emotional input

to trigger any affective response in them, even if we suppose that the

mechanism governing affective responsiveness remains intact.4

Despite this lack of empathy, there is preserved in autistics

some sort of moral sensibility. First of all, it has been argued that at

least some autistic children can make the moral-conventional

distinction, based on the observation that they show autonomic

response to pictures of people in fear or sadness. (253) More

remarkably, autistics tend to think in terms of duties or obligations, of

rules that are universally binding. (232) They are “often deeply

motivated to do the right thing” (233). For instance, they believe that

if stealing is wrong, it is so whatever the intent or circumstances. For

this reason, autistics are believed to be more Kantian than they are

Humean, and it has been argued, by Kennett for instance, that what

underlies autistic and typical moral agency is reason alone, rather

than Humean affects. (233-7)

2.3 McGeer’s account of moral agency

The quasi-moral5 capacities and behavioral patterns found in

autistics are fascinating and, at the same time, puzzling, given the

4 In their reply to McGeer, Frederique de Vignemont and Uta Frith (208: 274-5) contends that it is not true that the lack of emotional empathy in autistics results from impaired abilities of emotion recognition. For autistic children with a matched mental age show autonomic response when viewing pictures of people who are sad or afraid, which suggests that they are indeed sensitive to others’ distress. Furthermore, if we distinguish between “cognitive and affective components of empathetic behaviors,” it could be that autistics are responding, but they just don’t know how to respond properly, because they are not as emotionally reflective as we normally are. The have “difficulties in integrating the cognitive and affective facets of another person’s mental states.” But the bottom line is, they are still impaired, just not in the way psychopaths are.

5 By “quasi-moral” I mean that these capacities and behaviors may seem morally relevant or significant, but their real nature is yet to be determined.

fact that their empathetic capacities seem more severely impaired

than those of psychopaths. These capacities and behavioral patterns

are morally relevant: they seem to exhibit certain features we expect

to find in moral agents proper, and yet strike us as wanting in some

way. As McGeer puts it, on the one hand, autistics seem to display

some sort of “moral purity or innocence;” on the other hand, the

“rigidity, insensitivity, and even callousness toward others”

manifested in their way of thinking and acting make us somewhat

reluctant to count them as members of moral community. (247)

But one thing seems clear that empathy alone, if it is morally

relevant at all, or the lack of it, cannot be the difference maker. For,

otherwise, we would have found a parallel moral impairment in

autistics and psychopaths. How then do we explain the difference

between psychopaths and autistics? Do autistics really fare any better

than psychopaths in the moral regard? Should their remarkable quasi-

moral capacities and behaviors qualify them as moral agents? If the

answer is yes, what then underlies autistic moral agency? What

separates autistics from psychopaths? Since autistic obviously don’t

seem to behave as we normal moral agents do, what then

distinguishes them from other moral agents? These are the questions

McGeer attempts to answer.

First of all, McGeer argues that the Kantian explanation comes

too quick. (237-8) The thinking and behavioral patterns of autistics is

obviously peculiar in many aspects, and it is not clear that what

underlies them is “reverence for reason.” Nor can this reverence can

explain the peculiarity that has been puzzling us: Is it because most of

us are not genuinely Kantian whereas autistics are, following only the

voice of reason and never letting moral considerations be adulterated

by our sensual inclinations or prudential calculations? It doesn’t seem

likely, and, moreover, this would amount to passing what’s atypical

for the norm.

McGeer suggests, instead, it might be “an unusual (arational)

passion for order” (244) that is driving autistics’ moral reasoning and

behaviors. The rule-following patterns of autistics are only naively

Kantian: autistics seem insensitive to the particularities of a moral

situation and take no account of some intent or circumstances that we

think usually would exonerate one from blame. McGeer points out

that this peculiarity is not restricted to the moral realm; it is also

found in other aspects of the life of autistic individuals, especially

shown by their often repetitive, stereotyped, ritualistic behaviors.

They are extremely concerned that things are organized in exactly the

same way, or done in accord with rules that allow for no exceptions.

McGeer attributes this passion for order to the neurological disorder

in autistics:

Individuals with autism seem to have a great need to impose order on the world, no doubt because of neurological abnormalities that give rise to a disorienting, highly complicated, anxiety-inducing range of experiences. … Rules and routines help keep things the same, making the world emotionally and cognitively more approachable. To this end, autistic individuals are highly motivated to follow rules and are very concerned that others do so too. (239-40)

If this is the case, it seems, then, that the quasi-moral sensibility

found in autistics might have stemmed from their urgent need to

make sense of and navigate in the world in general, rather than from

concerns for reason or morality, or an adequate understanding of the

nature of moral rules.

But McGeer believes that autistics do constitute a genuine

variety of moral agency, 6 just not by virtue of their reverence for

reason. The account she proposes is broadly Humean, which includes

a functional characterization of moral emotions and an elaboration of

6 Yet, McGeer does not explain why she thinks so, and moves on directly to account for the distinctiveness of autistic moral agency. I take it that she assumes that autistic moral agency is intuitively uncontroversial and would probably agree with my test of our intuitions at the beginning of this paper.

the moral concerns these emotions are linked to. First, following

Jonathan Haidt, McGeer singles out moral emotions from other kinds

in terms of their “disinterested elicitors” and “disinterested action-

tendencies.” That is, moral emotions are provoked by “concerns that

reach beyond our narrow self-interest,” and “prime us (motivationally

and cognitively) to act in ways that benefit others or that uphold or

benefit structures that we value.” (248-9)

The two primary moral concerns that Haidt has identified are: 1)

concern with others’ well-being and 2) concern with social structure

and position. McGeer complains that these two concerns are

exclusively socially oriented, and adds to the list a third one, namely,

3) the concern with comic structure and position. She argues that

these three “distinct spheres of disinterested moral concern” are

rooted in quite different cognitive-affective systems, and gives an

evolutionary explanation for each of them:

(1) [C]oncern or compassion for others, growing out of the attachment system and fostered mainly by a capacity for emotional attunement between self and other, although later also supported by perspective-taking skills; (2) concern with social position and social structure, growing out of the need to operate within a hierarchically organized communal world and fostered by our highly developed perspective-taking skills; and finally, (3) concern with “cosmic” structure and position, growing out of the need to bring order and meaning to our lives and fostered by our capacity to view ourselves in inter-temporal terms. (229)

Evolutionary explanations of the first two concerns are readily

available: given our need to ensure survival and development, we are

programed to feel attached to our significant others, to care for those

that are close to us, to be concerned about how to maintain these

relations, how resources are distributed, how social roles with

particular rights and responsibilities are fulfilled, etc. (250) And their

moral significance is easily seen.

What sounds worrisome is the third concern. First of all, why

think there is such a thing? McGeer invites us to attend to the fact

that “human beings are uniquely preoccupied with questions about

the meaning of life, about the origin and fate of the universe, about

our place in the great scheme of things, and about whether or not

there is any great scheme of things at all.” These are not simply

intellectual: We “care passionately” about there being order in the

universe, about there being some meaning and shape-giving entity or

entities, God for instance. (250) But why does it matter to us so much

there being such cosmic order? McGeer suggests an evolutionary

explanation:

[T]hese affectively laden concerns are at least partially rooted in pattern-seeking cognitive machinery that is uniquely well developed in Homo sapiens and which is dedicated to imposing order and meaning on our interactions with the physical world across time, making it seem a more stable place to us and locating for us a stable place within it. Once these points of reference are in place, we are motivationally primed to engage in long-term planning that leads to better success in navigating our environment. (250-1)

She seems to be suggesting that the cosmic concern is rooted in our

abilities to think across time and in terms of patterns, and these

abilities enable us to better interact with the physical and social world

in which we locate ourselves.

McGeer claims that these three distinct moral concerns are

operative “in all human beings” (251). But which of the concerns is

“most dominant” varies with persons, depending on how these

concerns “develop and interact” in a given person, reflecting both

individual differences and cultural influences. It is this difference in

dominant concern that gives rise to “moderately different varieties” of

moral agency. And, since these moral concerns might lead to

different, or even conflicting, emotional responses in a particular

situation, the difference in dominance also explains how and why

people resolve such conflicts differently. (251-2) In particular, McGeer

argues, typically developing individuals are “vey much dominated” by

their concern for maintaining social order, the second on her list.

Now, autistic moral agents distinguish themselves not by their lacking

any of the three concerns. Rather, while the first two concerns “have

only the crudest roles to play” in shaping the moral emotions of

autistics, due to their affective and cognitive deficiencies, their

“cosmic” concern is relatively intact and governs their emotional

responses to morally charged situations, thereby giving rise to “an

entirely distinctive style of human moral agency.” (252-3)

Psychopaths, on the other hand, are disqualified as moral agents

because none of the three moral concerns seem to be operative in

them, “owing to an overall flattening in the affective tone of their

cognitive operations.” This is so even despite the possibility that one

might expect “some faint semblance” of concern for social order in

psychopaths, given their relatively good mindreading skills. (254)

3. Autistic moral agency? Some worries

Central to McGeer’s account of moral agency are the three

distinct moral concerns and how they could give rise to different types

of moral agency. McGeer concedes that her account is speculative in

nature. But this does not mean her account is not immune to

challenges.

3.1 What’s so moral about cosmic concern?

Most worrisome is what McGeer labels “cosmic” concern. Start

with a minor point: It is not at all clear what the mechanisms

underlying each moral concern are. To be fair, McGeer is not

elaborating, but merely pointing at one possible direction one might

go. Still, she has not given us enough to grasp, for instance, the exact

relation between (a) concern with cosmic structure and position, (b)

our need to bring order and meaning the world and our lives, and (c)

the capacity to think in inter-temporal terms. Sometimes she speaks

of (b) and (c) as the affective-cognitive system that fosters our cosmic

concern. (229) Sometimes it sounds like she is treating (a) and (b) as

identical and sees (c) as their origin. (250-1) As I understand it, (b) is

merely a more specific way of saying (a), and is rooted in (c).

A more important question about cosmic concern is: In what

way is it morally relevant? It is fairly easy to see that, for the most

part at least, we are all driven by a need to discover or impose order,

structure, and meaning upon the world we find ourselves in. It seems

plausible, as McGeer has argued, that we indeed have concern for

cosmic order. She also notes that this concern is not simply

intellectual, but also finds its way into our passions, reflected by

religious faith, by our feelings of awe or wonder at the beauty in

nature revealed by science, by deep contentment in the recognition of

our place in the universe, etc. (250) Now, suppose that the cosmic

concern does give rise to a set of emotions and that these emotions

meet Haidt’s two requirements for moral emotions, i.e., having

disinterested elicitors and action tendencies. Still, it is not clear

what’s so moral about these emotions. First of all, Haidt is not

defining moral emotions; that is he is not specifying necessary and

sufficient conditions for them. (249) The two requirements are, at

most, only necessary conditions, are useful tools for identifying moral

emotions. Hence, even if the emotions stemming from the cosmic

concern do satisfy these two conditions, it remains an open question

whether these emotions indeed qualify as moral emotions. Moreover,

while we have no difficulty seeing the moral relevance of concerns

with other’s well-being and social order, our actions from out of

cosmic concern, even if they are disinterested in nature, are not

distinctively moral. As McGeer has noted herself, some of these

actions, e.g., scientific endeavors, could be purely intellectual,

involving no moral considerations whatsoever. It is true that we might

be “passionate” in these actions, but these passions alone do not make

our cosmic concern morally significant, even in a Humean way.

In reply to a similar worry, McGeer points to the fact that

Many moral codes, perhaps more prominently in ancient and nonwestern cultures, have a number of prohibitions or exhortations about how to live in harmony with a universal order. … If anything, many actions that are taken to fall outside the moral domain in some cultures (e.g., our own) are moralized by others precisely because of the way they prioritize this sort of concern (e.g., cleansing rituals, vegetarianism, or treating the environment in a certain way). (287)

These moral codes, found in ancient Greece, Egypt, Persia, China, and

India, prescribe a way of living that is derived from and in accord with

a proper understanding of the order in the universe. The reason why

they are different or why they moralize actions we now don’t consider

morally relevant is that their moral thinking is dominated by the

cosmic concern rather than concerns that are more socially oriented.

Not only can we find varieties of morality founded on cosmic concern,

but such a concern also explains an otherwise mysterious

phenomenon that our concern with particular others and social order

can be and are “frequently and blatantly sacrificed for the sake of

some greater good”; this greater good, McGeer thinks, is “maintaining

the cosmic order.” (288)

But, even if concern with cosmic order, perhaps together with

some other concerns, could constitute a distinct variety of moral

agents and perhaps, morality, it seems that such a morality is not just

substantially different from, but may contradict, our own. It does not

merely “moralize” actions that we now think are of no moral

significance, but also actions that we consider morally wrong, e.g., the

way society was divided into classes or castes, the way women were

treated. How do we resolve conflicts of this kind? It is advisable just to

keep an open mind? Or, do we need a better way out? This question

will become more pressing when we consider autistic moral agency as

McGeer characterizes it.

3.2 Cosmic concern and autistic moral agency

Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that concern with cosmic

structure and position is indeed morally relevant. Why think that it is

this cosmic concern that underlies the thinking and behavioral

patterns of autistics? McGeer gives reasons for thinking why the first

two moral concerns are operative in autistics, those high-functioning

individuals at least, although they are empathetically impaired and

have poor perspective-taking skills. But when it comes to the concern

with cosmic order, she simply assumes, without explanation, that this

concern is “underpinned by a relatively intact cognitive-affective

system” and that it dominates autistics moral agency. She doesn’t

even care to point out what in autistics might indicate their well-

preserved capacity for inter-temporal thinking. (253)

It is true that autistics are deeply motivated to seek and invent

patterns in the physical environment and in their interactions with

other people, so that the world could become less overwhelming,

more accessible and manageable, both affectively and cognitively.

Even if one might find some parallels between these patterns-seeking

behaviors of autistics and our quest for the meaning of our lives or

our pursuit of religious faith and scientific knowledge, it is far from

clear whether these two sets of behaviors have the same source. As

McGeer herself has suggested in rejecting the rationalistic account of

autistic moral agency, the peculiar behavioral patterns we find in

autistics could be just a result of “neurological abnormalities.” So,

either McGeer is being inconsistent in explaining the peculiarities of

these behavioral patterns, or it is premature to attribute these

patterns to some sort of cosmic concern.

Suppose that the cosmic concern in autistics is grounded in

their relatively intact capacity to look both backward into the past and

forward into the future and plan for their lives and that this concern

in them does give rise to a distinctive yet genuine variety of moral

agency. The question raised in last section resurfaces in a new form.

While the conflicts emerges there may be regarded as cross-cultural

and resolved with an open mind, possible conflicts between typical

moral agency and autistic moral agency cannot be viewed and

resolved in a similar fashion. Given the cosmic concern that dominates

their moral reasonings, autistics may behave in ways that seem

indifferent to what we take to be morally significant, or even contrary

to our moral convictions. Tensions of this kind are obviously not cross-

cultural, and there should be things we can say and do about autistics

in moral contexts, in addition to being merely open-minded. In other

words, if autistics are to be admitted into our moral community, we

should be able to criticize and even reinforce certain types of

behaviors. Otherwise, we have relocate autistic moral agents in a

community that is morally alienated from ours and look at them from

distance as we look at remote cultures or histories, which seems a

non-starter to me.

3.3 Diagnosis of the amorality of psychopaths

What could also be made clearer is McGeer’s preferred

explanation of psychopaths’ lack of moral sensibility. McGeer

emphasizes that the three concerns she identifies are operative in all

humans. It is just that, in typically developing individuals, the

concerns with others’ well-being and social order are more salient,

whereas autistics are dominated by the cosmic concern. However, in

explaining why psychopaths are not moral agents, she suggests that

none of the moral concerns is operative in them. Also, McGeer seems

to agree with Kennett’s diagnosis that psychopaths are driven by

immediate impulses and, more than often, make poor practical

judgments, indicating that they seem to be impaired in inter-temporal

thinking and that their cosmic concern could not be operating

dominantly. But, since psychopaths are remarkably good at

mindreading, McGeer speculates that “some faint semblance” of the

concern for social order is operative in psychopaths, albeit in a

“seriously distorted” form and “not tempered in the least by other

sorts of disinterested concerns (for others’ well-being, for cosmic

structure and position) or even by a well-elaborated social emotional

repertoire.” (254) McGeer needs to be a bit more specific in this

regard.

If our moral nature is what makes us distinctively human and

none of the three moral concerns is found in psychopaths, it seems we

have to conclude that psychopaths are less than human. But suppose

all the three moral concerns are actually operative in psychopaths,

and just irredeemably dormant, “owing to an overall flattening in the

affective tone of their cognitive operations” (254). Suppose McGeer

would agree that it is this fact about psychopaths that gives rise to

their amoral nature. Still, McGeer must explain why the absence of

any dominant moral concern would disqualify psychopaths as a moral

agent whereas a single relatively intact moral concern would do the

trick for autistics. She probably needs a more elaborate account of

how the three concerns can generate moral agency at all and how the

way they develop and interact would make a difference in types of

moral agency.

Conclusion

I have in this paper taken a critical look at McGeer’s pluralistic

account of moral agency. On her proposal, there are three moral

concerns that are operative in all humans; the differences in dominant

concern, due to developmental differences or cultural influences, give

rise to various kinds of moral agency; and the distinctiveness of

autistic moral agency is explained by the cosmic concern that

dominates the moral life of autistics, whereas the moral nature of

typically developing individuals are shaped by the concern with

others’ well-being and social order. It is not clear, however, whether

and how the comic concern is morally relevant, whether it is this

concern that underlies the seemingly moral thinking and behavior

patterns of autistics, and what an adequate explanation of

psychopaths’ lack of moral agency would be on McGeer’s account.

References

Victoria McGeer, “Varieties of Moral Agency: Lessons from Autism (and Psychopathy)” in Moral Psychology (vol. 3) The neuroscience of morality: Emotion, disease and development, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. MIT Press, 2008: 227-257

______, “The Makings of A Moral Sensibility: Replies to Comments from Jeannette Kennett, Heidi Maibom, and Frederique de Vignemont and Uta Frith” in Moral Psychology (vol. 3) The neuroscience of morality: Emotion, disease and development, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. MIT Press, 2008: 281-296

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