Many autistic people need practical help with daily tasks related with self-organization, such as planning things ahead for activities such as traveling or shopping. Such help can be arranged for several domains, which is reflected in different forms of guardianship that may support everyday decisions (e.g., decisions for food, clothing etc.), or medical and financial decisions (cf. ibid., p. 961).
The observation that autistic people generally need more (practical) support in comparison to non-autists is sometimes taken as an a priori argument against their potential of be(com)ing autonomous (Bloom
2015). This is reflected in the conflation of autonomy and Theory of Mind (ToM). This ToM and similar observations (e.g., studies on weak central coherence theory, cf. Frith
2003) as well as critical reflections upon these studies (e.g., McGuire and Michalko
2011; Milton
2014; Verhoeff
2015), seem to indicate that autistic people do not grasp other people’s goals and intentions, nor that they are able to develop or organize a way of life according to their preferences, goals and interests (Lyons and Fitzgerald
2013, p. 752). From the observation that autistic children do not grasp others’ intentions and perspectives as non-autistic people do, it is assumed that they also do not grasp their own intentions and perspectives. This line of thinking fuels some parents, professionals and advocacy organizations to suppose that autistic people do not actually know what is “good” for them and that their behavior negatively affects others and therefore need to learn certain skills to cope with their environment. This becomes problematic, when interference (denying negative liberty) becomes the default without critical reflection whether that is justified or when the desirability of interference is assumed due to ill fitting with social norms/desirable behavior. For instance, when an autistic child openly objects towards taking medicine, parents and legal authorities often justify the continuation of treatment, based on the positively valued changed behavior of the child (e.g., being less aggressive) (see Benson and Pinnaro
2015).
2 This is an interesting case to distinguish between helping and interfering; how we judge this case depends largely on how we understand autism and autonomy. If the child cannot decide for himself, because his preferences are irrational, he lacks the capacity to reflect or understand the consequences of his actions, the parents should help to choose the best option (whether medicine to be less aggressive is always the best option and is always helping, is another questions to be considered). If we understand the child as having a growing capacity to become autonomous, the parents may need to help the child understand his own preferences, his own beliefs and help reflect upon what would be good for him. Trying to understand the preferences of the child, by taking these serious and into consideration in decision making helps him to become autonomous and simultaneously may help to find more proportionate, less radical and better suiting (treatment) options. If the child is (becoming) autonomous, ignoring his growing capacities, preferences and simply providing the medicine would be interference. The default in the context of autism seems to be that this distinction—between interference and help—is not made. In a situation with socially undesirable behavior, the default is that others decide. This is problematic, not only because it hampers the child to become (more) autonomous; paternalistic actions like these also hamper the understanding why the child behaves in a certain manner and what may truly help him. Another example that indicates that there is a strong “behavior standard” for deciding what is good for autists can be found in applied behavioral analysis (ABA), a contested therapy that is aimed at teaching autists to display social behavior, basically focuses on “turning” autists into “social thinkers” (Richman
2015, p. 356). ABA entails that autists are trained to adapt to social conventions, for example learning to shake hands (ibid.). Some empirical studies also describe other examples such as the use of egg-timers to teach autistic people to eat slowly so that others do not feel disturbed and become willing to integrate the autistic person in the group (Hendriks
1998). In a school context, Sjödin (
2015) describes an autistic student, whose interests and values are systematically disencouraged by school authorities: although she shows her strengths in taking initiative to structure and explain specific topics, teachers point out her weaknesses with regard to her style of working, such as her inability to follow the timetable and rules in class (Sjödin
2015, p. 91).
Non
-autists often intervene in autists’s decisions so that they cannot be called to be “free from interference”. For autists it is assumed that they (1) do not know what is good for them (2) need to adapt to rules and social conventions and become “equal” members of society (3) have limited capacities and resources to develop themselves. While many autists need help with daily tasks or within certain social situations, interference with their lives is not automatically legitimized; help offered by non-autists may be useful to overcome barriers, as opposed to interference that may hamper the autist to pursue his own goals and thereby harm the original idea of negative liberty. As pointed out by Robeyns, constraining options or attempts influencing decisions are “likely to happen much more with autistic persons” (Robeyns
2016, p. 7), because autists might have issues to explain themselves in the immediate situation. In the following, we will argue that there are instances where autists show that they are free (in the positive liberty sense), which also has relevance for respecting their negative liberty.