As a person on the spectrum "help others in need" is actually a very difficult concept because I don't really care about them. When something happens around me where I'm not directly involved my instinct is to ignore it or to get out of the situation so that I can go on with my life.
The only difference is when I see unfairness or injustice, then I feel like I have to do something about it. But it usually isn't about the person, it's about the principle.
I am autistic as well and what you are saying makes no sense to me. When someone is in need around me and requires help, by definition they need help and are not currently receiving it, which is an injustice and unfair. Therefore I have to remedy the injustice, therefore I have to help. That is how I experience the autistic sense of justice. How are you reconciling that contradiction?
Why do you perceive somebody who needs held and requires it as injustice? Helping others is an ethical thing, the right thing to do, but never an obligation that we owe them.
They probably have a high degree of empathy and feel intrinsically moved to make ethical decisions. Autistic people can have high empathy or low empathy, just like anyone else.
As I already answered elsewhere, empathy and justice are not the same thing, and it's a bit irritating that people don't observe separation of concerns principle.
A situation where someone requires help but is not receiving it is unjust, because people's needs are not being met while others have more than they need. It is also unfair, because if you require help and have several randomly distributed attributes, you will receive that help, whereas if you require help and do not have those random accidents of birth you generally will not receive that help. That is definitionally unfair, because random chance is deciding the outcomes of people's lives.
This doesn't really makes sense. Two things that you mention, like determining what people need and role of random chance, don't have anything to do with justice.
For me, justice is fulfilment of obligations between people, that we either take explicitly (as promises or contracts), or a very limited number that should be implicitly upheld by all — about aggression and property. But while helping others is a good deed, I don't think anybody thinks you have an obligation to anybody except your own conciseness or g-d, if you believe in one.
And about random chance — that's your relationship with nature or g-d (again, used here not out of religious sense, but just a very useful rhetoric device), and they're not subjects to justice, because they're not people. Surely, you don't expect other people to have an obligation to correct nature or g-d's perceived mistakes or injustices?
I'm not the person you're talking to but I am autistic and I do experience a powerful obligation to help others in need. I feel it deeply in my very soul and I always have; I experience every choice not to act on it as a crushing moral and spiritual failure. I understand this isn't typical but surely you can see that it is a possible experience of the world for some people to have?
That does not contradict my point in any way. I do experience this "obligation" too, and help others, but I don't think this word fits here. But that's just an emotion — that's not a real obligation that I actually owe somebody except for myself.
Emotions are my own volition — I'm free to experience whatever I fee like. Real obligations are not; I have to respect them regardless of my internal emotional state.
It's the distinction between something that requires personal consent: my own decision to be charitable — and something that doesn't: my obligations. If I owe you money, you can use force to get it. You can't use force me to be charitable.
I experience this as well, it's a pretty common autistic perspective. Not sure exactly why. Seeing need can be overwhelming as a result as my brain is not filtering out the "should i weigh my potential discomfort to help this person?" question, in the way or degree that many/most neurotypical brains do.
oddly enough, autistic people can have an extremely heightened sense of empathy and moral justice compared to the average population. this seems to me to personally have some very distinct upsides and downsides.
Yes, I spent a lot of my life being very upset at a lot of people who weren't autistic until I read the studies that started coming out showing that it's verifiably the case that autistic people do various things that I have always thought of as "the autistic sense of justice", things that non-autistic people largely don't. For example, doing the right thing regardless of how observable your action is, or resisting social pressures not to break normalcy, or the OP's point about the bystander effect.
When I was in school, I was in the office as part of something else when another young girl began throwing up in the waiting room. There were between five and ten people in the room and the mouth of an adjacent hallway, most of whom noticed before me, because I was reading in the hallway. When I realised what was happening, I ran over to her and held her hair, helped her stay clean, asked the office ladies for a bag and help cleaning up so she could get to the sick bay without slipping, and generally did my best to comfort her. It was very distressing because I got some of the vomit on my hands and had to deal with that for a long time until I could wash them properly. This was not a gender thing because I wasn't the only girl among the students and the office ladies were female. Later that day when school was ending, I was in the office waiting to be picked up and one of the office ladies came over to tell me she thought I was very brave and selfless for having helped that girl. This made me really upset and I asked her why she and the other people hadn't done anything until I asked her for the bag, which got me in a lot of trouble for talking back to admin staff. The guidance counselor at school told me later that they didn't act because they were shocked, which didn't make any sense because they all learned before me so they should have had more time to recover from any potential shock and help, and it didn't make that much sense in the first place that someone just vomiting around them would put every single person into a state of shock.
That is the first incident I can remember where I felt this specific type of anger, but it happened many times in different contexts over the course of my life (once I started watching the news, it would happen very often because of the events depicted there). When these studies started coming out, it explained a lot of things to me and was honestly a huge relief. I had gone through life thinking that a lot of people who were otherwise kind were (apparently at random) cruel, or selfish, or prioritised doing the "normal" thing over other people being hurt, and I didn't understand why they didn't just do the right thing, especially in cases where it's not even hard to do. Specifically, it was reassuring to know that there was probably some neural or developmental difference that was causing them to act this way, and that it wasn't an intentional choice. I know being diagnosed as autistic and learning about autistic patterns of behaviour that I fit helped me feel less bad about how often other people complained that I had made them feel bad for responding to their emotions incorrectly, using incorrect emotions in a given situation, or making people afraid if I had a meltdown. It helped me not because I felt like it gave me carte blanche to just do these things which made other people uncomfortable or hurt, but because in understanding what was happening I could try to find ways to manage the effects on other people and counteract the parts that were anti-social when it mattered, for example by making sure to explain my tone and emotional affect explicitly in circumstances where I suspect someone has misunderstood it. My hope is that as more of this research comes out on why people who aren't autistic often do the wrong thing, it can help them to do the right thing more often and manage more effectively the consequences that their not-autism can have on other people, in the same way as learning about autism helped me to manage the negative effects that my autism could often have on other people.
This is likely due to you having low empathy, which is orthogonal to autism (although it may contribute to a lesser ability to mask and therefore a higher likelihood of diagnosis).
The only difference is when I see unfairness or injustice, then I feel like I have to do something about it. But it usually isn't about the person, it's about the principle.