The other day, I crossed the street within fifty feet of a crosswalk. I'm such a criminal!
Seriously, though, why would Aspies commit crimes any more than NTs do? I mean, we do commit crimes; and I have done so myself (the worst has probably been speeding by 15 mph over the limit, which is worse than you think because it's unsafe), but in general, why would we? We have the same conscience that anyone else does; we're actively antisocial only about as often as NTs are; and we tend to prefer private activities, while crime is often a social activity.
I don't know where I've read it, but people with AS are actually significantly less likely than NTs to commit crimes, and classic auties even less so. A combination of being natural rule-followers and crime being by its nature often a social activity probably accounts for this--there doesn't seem to be any detectable difference between our sense of morality compared to NTs'.
Quote:
Honour among thieves is well known. I think the mistake a lot of people make is to think that the law is the same thing as honour or morality. I think the law is a mixture of things, with honourable and dishonourable intentions and effects.
Certainly. The law and morality are different things; anyone who's studied ethics, even casually, knows that. Think back a couple hundred years when we still had slaves in America--who were the moral people then, the people who were keeping slaves, or the people who broke the law to help them escape? Even back then, people knew it wasn't right to own another human being, and they spent so much time justifying it that the sermons from back then were often torturous twisting of Scripture (seriously, read some of them sometime; it's guaranteed to make any Bible scholar shudder). Today, some laws have no moral implications; for example, there's a local law that it's illegal to ride my bicycle on the sidewalk, even though this is quite safe to do. (It's designed to stop kids from clogging the sidewalks with bicycles, roller skates, and skateboards, and has the effect of also blocking bike commuters from busy streets where it's unsafe to share the road with cars going 50 mph.) Other laws have very obvious moral implications--the laws against murder are an obvious example. The law can't enforce morality; it can only enforce social order. It can be a great tool to make it easier to be a moral person and to bring justice when people are not moral; but it can be misused, as well, and horribly so.