Social justice and empathy

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Hi have the question, how do you separate social justice and empathy?

Perhaps I'm being stupid and missing something? I've read in alot of places that aspies can have a strong sense of social justice. which is very true because my youngest at the moment is really struggling with the idea he thinks his teacher is picking on a couple of the kids in his classroom and this is bothering him no end.

Empathy I've read is not really an ASD trait, I've also recently been told this about my adult son. I do dispute this claim though. I think people on the spectrum can be just as if not more empathetic as nt's.

Just wondering how on one hand the professionals can claim aspies can have a strong sense of social justice, but then claim aspies/people with an asd have a lack of empathy?

I say you are correct that aspies are even more empathetic than nts. Their brain/heart go about it differently so it looks different. They have theory of mind problems but once they do think about others, their heart goes out to them. Just my opinion.

For me, personally, it was never a matter of empathy as much as a matter of right vs. wrong. I tend to cling tightly to social rules that I (think) do understand. I would get so unhinged if we were feeding pidgeons and one bird got more bread than the other. When watering the garden with a hose it was the same story. One flower could not have a longer drink than any other flower! PERIOD! I come unglued when things are not balanced EXACTLY right!

Your son may have a concept in his mind of how life ought to work, and uses it as his standard for everyone and everything.
Just a thought...

I have 0 tolerance for bullying, injustice and capitalism (or any other system that allows one to have more than the others)

I hate, hate HATE the word empathy in this context. It's not a well-defined word and it doesn't really express what is going on in an Autistic mind. See this thread: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt136967.html

I would agree that the sense of social justice often comes from a sense of rules and order, but I think it also often is because people on the spectrum are compassionate and identify with other marginalized groups when they gain an understanding of the similarities between their situations. "Empathy" as defined in the diagnostic criterion for autism, does not rule out compassion, nor does it rule out being able to sympathize. It's a poor word choice for difficulty communicating or understanding emotional states.

I agree with momsparky - the diagnosticians need to remove the word empathy from their language. From what I have seen in my own child and others and read on these boards, people with autism are more than capable of feeling empathy. Maybe not everyone but I have seen enough to know that having autism definitely does not preclude a person from experiencing empathy. That being said, social justice is an entirely different thing. Social justice is about rules and right and wrong, not about how people feel.

From what you've said so far in this and an earlier post (at least I think it was you, sorry if I've got the wrong person ), I think its hard to tell if he is getting upset because he feels empathy with the kids in his class who are receiving discipline from the teacher or if he thinks the teacher is not sticking to the rules and is handing down punishment in what your son may see as an arbitrary way. In other words, is he putting himself in the other child's shoes and feeling bad because he knows getting punished feels bad no matter what one has done to deserve it or does think the teacher is acting unfairly? Does that distinction make any sense?

Social justice, I feel, refers to something very black and white. Rules and the even, and equal application of them to all. If justice is in fact blind then it must be an Aspie holding those scales...

Empathy is a totally seperate and alien concept. Th dictionary definition is:

1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.

I, personally, and very accomplished in the second definition - moreso than the 'NT's' around me. But the first - in the moment while face to face with a another human being - I'm kind of lost. I can infer what they are probably feeling by the situation. I've gotten pretty good at reading body language and expression cues. But the purely intellectual instinctive reaction to the emotional experiences of others will always be a matter of deduction and active reasoning for me. I'm Sherlock Holmes to the NT's Watson...

As a diagnostic criteria - the EXACT meaning and intent of the word 'empathy' needs to be defined with absolute terms. It is open to too much individual interpretation and misinterpretation often times being lumped together with sympathy. Sympathy is subjective. Empathy is subconsciously objective. We just lack that subconscious autopilot switch for empathy. That doesn't mean we are incapable - we just need to use the manual override.

When i was about 6 i cam up with probably the best way that i used to see the world (and still mostly do).

I can think. I know that and i can reason with myself. I can't see inside anyone else's heads to see if they can too so effectively they can't. Nobody can think and are basically robots or just another random object. I can feel attachment to one but it is the same as my teddy, they are both objects.

If something is threatening any objects, i will try to remove that threat. It is what is right.

Two days ago a few people played a trick on a woman at work. She mentioned that she was deathly afraid of spiders so they thought it be funny to hide plastic spiders on and in her desk when she left the room. She found one in her coffee cup, shrieked and bolted across the room and those people all started laughing. A few minutes later she found another one in her middle drawer, shrieked and bolted across the room again. Those people laughed even harder. I went to her desk and searched with her permission, I found 5 more of the things. I berated the people and told them it wasn't cool at all and they just called me a party-pooper. I've been waiting for them to try something with me but I don't think they will, they're probably afraid about how I'd react.

Perhaps because we must consciously remind ourselves of what others want and require, we are more likely to act "empathetic" and otherwise according to a system of morality than one for whom this is not a constant effort of conscious thought.

It is hard to want to inflict pain and suffering when you actually have to remind yourself that others can experience it.

This reminds me of Stanley Milgram's classic Obedience and Authority experiment. What Milgram noted was that it took a huge amount of effort to make the "victim's" pain so obvious to the testee that the testee was reluctant to continue further. Even having the "victim" in the same room, sitting inches away from the "testee," and having the "victim" scream and flail, was not sufficient to keep a majority of his subjects from ramping up the voltage to its maximum.

Interestingly, he discovered that a tiny presence of doubt (by including a second authority figure) was enough to significantly reduce this effect.

Something similar occurs in the Asch Conformity experiment. They noticed that the presence of a single dissenter from the majority agreeing with the true value, was enough to drive conformity to almost zero. All it took was one voice of doubt, and the conformity was eliminated. Note that if the dissenter recants, the subject conforms just as often as normally.

Now imagine if every single interaction with others was marked by the conscious recognition and evaluation of the rules of behaviour, doubts about one's actions, and similar consciously-expressed and explicit concerns. I would imagine that this explicit reasoning would have the same effect as a contradicting authority or dissenter.

An aspie may not notice social cues, but will almost certainly be aware that they exist and that they are to be interpreted according to some rules. This awareness, I think, makes it likely that an aspie will act according to their morality rather than a whim. Even if the aspie in question can't quite explain why they acted the way they did.

I do think that aspies are nonempathic in the sense that they're difficult for neurotypicals to empathize with. Without the facial expressions and other cues that neurotypicals depend on, the neurotypicals are at a loss what to think.

Perhaps it's just human nature that they manage to attribute the "lack of empathy" to the aspies rather than correctly attributing it to themselves.

I don't disagree that there's a deficit, but if you read the thread, the phrase "lack of empathy" is used to describe psycotics who deliberately hurt people - which could not be further from the social communication skills deficit that causes this effect in Aspies. There needs to be a descriptive phrase, but I think that word isn't it.

^^^ this.

Aspies traits render the NT ability to empathize useless.