People with autism are statistically less likely to commit crimes than people without autism.
It is, however, not impossible for a person to be both autistic and a sociopath. Both conditions are very common; autism is 1:100, sociopathy, anywhere from 1:100 to 1:20 depending on how you define it. Even by sheer chance, there will exist some autistic sociopaths, and some of those will go on to commit highly-publicized crimes. Moreover, people who commit highly publicized crimes are extremely likely to either be diagnosed with a mental disorder or have a prior diagnosis made public, because it is comforting for people to think that somehow, someone who did something horrible could not have willingly chosen to do it; it's comforting to think that humans are not capable of things like that, to excuse it. But humans are perfectly capable of doing horrible things, however much we like to pretend they are not.
There has been some research on autism and morality, and it's been established that autistic people have firm systems of morality just like non-autistic people do. The only difference seems to be that autistic people are more likely to prefer concrete rules (such as "It is important to make sure everyone has enough to eat") rather than working by feelings ("I would feel horrible if I didn't help that hungry person") . While autistic people are less likely to experience emotional contagion (the tendency to pick up the emotions of those around you), their sense of compassion is entirely unimpaired: Once they are informed of someone else's feelings, they care just as much as a non-autistic person would. Some actually care very deeply, perhaps precisely because they are not used to being aware of others' emotions, so that when they are made aware, they are unable to ignore that reality. I have met autistic people who will cry inconsolably if they understand they have accidentally hurt another person, or hurt an animal, or even damaged a beautiful or delicate object.
Just like any other human being, autistic people are capable of choosing between great good and great evil. Occasionally, an autistic person will choose evil. He does this not because he's autistic, but because he's a human being and he made a choice. Autism doesn't impair your ability to make moral choices. Certainly it can be easier to choose to do something evil if you have been mistreated for a long time; but the very existence of people who have been mistreated, and who do not choose to hurt others, proves that this is a choice and not an inevitability.
It worries me that autism may become associated with antisocial actions in the public mind. As far as I'm concerned, the best I can do is to be an example of an ordinary, non-homicidal person who happens to have autism--awkward, disabled, often socially oblivious, but someone who, like most people, would rather die than kill an innocent. I advise the rest of you to do the same. Autistic people are not saints, but we're not demons either. If we can just tell the world what it's really like to be autistic--what our mundane, everyday lives are like, how we experience all the same human universals that they experience--then autism won't be scary and foreign anymore.
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Sane people are boring!
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