Detailing the understanding of moral judgements in autism. A study with Spanish-speaking children

Abstract

Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. establishes a goal; (ii) intention-deliberate: the agent may make a plan to obtain his/her goal; (iii) control of the action: the agent carries out the actions included in that plan; and (iv) outcome: that action triggers an outcome or consequence. Thus, to evaluate the morality of the agent, the observer should correctly infer the agent's desires (whether they are prosocial or antisocial), beliefs (whether the agent has true or false beliefs according to reality) and the agent's intention (whether the act was carried out on purpose or accidentally) and, finally, use this information to decide whether the agent is a good or bad person, or even his/her innocence or guilt in the event. According to this model, the moral evaluation of the agent would be in some cases independent of the outcome. For example, we could imagine this situation: Mark wants to kill a bird and he has the deliberate intention of doing it, but finally, he failed to do it. Mark will be judged as a "bad person" for the mere presence of a malicious desire (regardless of whether the bird does not die), true belief (he knows he can kill the bird using, for example, a stone) and his deliberate intention of doing this action, which speaks strongly against his morality than the final outcome. Thus, it seems that, first, the moral judgements that a person makes about another agent will depend mostly on the inferences made about the agent's desires, beliefs and intention, and not only on the outcome of his/her action (as in the case of the bird). Second, another judgement can be contemplated in the bird situation: judgements of moral wrongness, which will depend on the agent's mental states and also the agent's action, e.g. if the child kills the bird on purpose, this will be wrong because of the action itself, but also because the child planned it deliberately. Finally, according to Cushman (2015), judgments concerning punishment will depend not only on actions and mental states, but also on the outcome caused by his/her actions (in this case, laws make no provision for his/her punishment). Therefore, the mature development of the capacity for understanding mental states will be important for adequate moral reasoning. For this reason, younger children between 3 and 4 years of age usually focus more on the outcome (e.g., the child hit his sister and now she is crying), and less on the intent or the mental states of the agent (i.e. he did not mean any harm or he did not do it on purpose). See Cushman, Sheketoff, Wharton, and Carey (2013) and Margoni and Surian (2017), for more information.

Investigating moral judgements in autistic children: integrating the observer’s and the speaker’s mind

“…In Grant et al's (2015) and Fadda et al's (2016) studies, the good scores of the autistic group were explained by the fact that they could learn by using their own experience or if they were explicitly taught, rather than applying complex ToM reasoning. Also, in the study by Garcia-Molina et al (2019), ASD group were as able as NT group to respond to the questions about transgressions when the answers were forced-choice, as in the present study.…”