Topics Love

Question Can autistic people epistemically love or know of love? Let's say we are to accept this portion of SEP: To distinguish loving from liking via the intuition that the “depth” of love is to be explained in terms of a notion of identification: to love someone is somehow to identify yourself with him, whereas no such notion of identification is involved in liking. As Nussbaum puts it, “The choice between one potential love and another can feel, and be, like a choice of a way of life, a decision to dedicate oneself to these values rather than these” (1990, p. 328); liking clearly does not have this sort of “depth.” But empathy is hard for an autist. It is difficult for them to put themselves in someone’s shoes and imagining their experience(s). Autists cannot feel the perspective of hurt or sad when someone else is in pain. So, how can they love if they can’t identify?

Accepted:
March 2, 2021

Comments

There are, indeed,

There are, indeed, philosophical issues that go with your question. But I think it's important to address the factual background. The premise of your question is that if someone has autism, she can't, as we say, feel other people's pain, or joy, or... And both from knowing people on the autism spectrum and having read around on the topic, I would say that you're mistaken about that. This link
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-autism-spectrum-disorder/2...
isn't to a scholarly piece, but my sense is that it gets things broadly right. The author is a therapist, and also is on the autism spectrum. Her point is that we need to distinguish between feeling other people's emotions and processing/making sense of cognitively of the incoming information that triggers the feelings. The author puts it in terms of a "time lag": for a person with autism, interpreting cues and making sense of other people's behavior may take longer. But that doesn't mean that people with autism aren't capable of empathy. And it doesn't mean that people with autism can't love; they can.

That's the main thing I wanted to say. But a quite different point occurs to me. Suppose we think—plausibly—that love involves feelings, and involves them essentially, not just incidentally. Then religious believers face an obvious problem with the idea that God loves us—or at least there's a problem if you think that God doesn't have feelings. And given the kind of thing a being would have to be to be God, it's not easy to make sense of the idea that such a being could feel. There's a novel from many years ago by Mary Gordon called Final Payments that explores some of the surrounding territory.