The book
Deborah R. Barnbaum. The Ethics of Autism: Among Them, but Not of Them. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. 233 pp. Part of the Bioethics and the Humanities series.
What it argues
Barnbaum takes the theory of mind deficit account of autism, primarily Baron-Cohen’s framework, and follows it to its philosophical conclusions. If autistic people cannot fully represent other minds, what does this mean for consciousness, for language, for moral agency, for the ethics of genetic intervention and cure?
The book is structured in five chapters. The first introduces autism philosophically. The second considers the value of an autistic life. The third applies moral theories to autism, asking whether and how autistic people can be moral agents. The fourth examines genetic technologies and the question of cure. The fifth addresses research ethics for autistic participants. Each chapter includes a “Voices of Autism” section featuring short contributions from autistic people.
The central philosophical claim is that autistic people, because they lack (on Barnbaum’s account) the capacity to fully model other minds, cannot be moral agents in the standard Kantian sense. They can achieve a kind of moral behaviour through rule-following and logical reasoning, through imitation and adherence to learned principles, but not through the empathic engagement that Barnbaum treats as the foundation of full moral agency. Autistic people are, on this account, moral in a derivative way. They can be among us, but not of us. The subtitle is the thesis.
Why it matters to this wiki
The book is not recommended as a guide to the ethics of autism. It is documented here because it is an unusually clear example of several failures that this wiki’s philosophy cluster examines in the abstract. Barnbaum put them into practice.
The unexamined premise
The entire argument rests on the theory of mind deficit account. Barnbaum treats this as settled science: autistic people lack the ability to recognise that other persons have minds. From this premise, the philosophical conclusions follow logically enough. The problem is that the premise was already contested when the book was published and has since been substantially undermined.
Milton’s double empathy problem (2012) reframed the social-cognitive difficulty as bidirectional: neurotypical people are equally poor at reading autistic minds, which means the “deficit” is a mismatch between neurotypes, not a unilateral failure in one of them (see The double empathy problem). Crompton et al. (2020) confirmed this empirically. The foundation Barnbaum built on has shifted, and the building leans accordingly.
This is the Socratic problem identified on the Socratic inquiry page: when a field’s foundational assumption goes unexamined, the research it generates confirms the assumption rather than testing it. Barnbaum did not ask whether autistic people lack theory of mind. She asked what follows from the fact that they do. The question presupposed its own answer.
Epistemic injustice in action
The book includes autistic voices. Each chapter has its “Voices of Autism” section. But the architecture of the argument does not depend on those voices, and where autistic testimony contradicts the theoretical framework, the framework wins. Autistic people’s accounts of their own moral reasoning, their relationships, their inner lives are present in the text but do not shape the conclusions.
This is the pattern described on the epistemic justice page: testimonial injustice, where the credibility of a speaker is deflated because of their identity. Barnbaum does not dismiss autistic testimony overtly. She includes it, frames it sympathetically, and then proceeds to reach conclusions that the testimony itself contradicts. The “Voices of Autism” sections read, in retrospect, less like genuine epistemic partnership and more like the consultation-without-power that Pickard et al. (2022) documented in participatory research (see Participatory research and epistemic justice).
The normalisation benchmark
Barnbaum’s account of moral agency defines the standard by neurotypical capacities. Empathic engagement, the ability to model other minds and respond to their contents, is treated as the prerequisite for full moral status. Autistic people are measured against this standard and found to achieve morality only by an alternative, lesser route.
Chapman’s Empire of Normality (2023) identifies this as a recurring structure: the neurotypical mind is treated as the unmarked default, and neurodivergent minds are evaluated by how closely they approximate it. Barnbaum does not argue that autistic people are immoral. She argues they are moral in the wrong way, which is a more insidious claim because it sounds generous while encoding a hierarchy.
The Critical Neurodiversity project has turned Barnbaum’s framework back on itself, asking whether neurotypical people have “intact moral agency” given the well-documented tendency toward in-group bias, conformity, and obedience to authority that characterises neurotypical social cognition. If moral agency requires the ability to resist social pressure and reason independently about ethical questions, the neurotypical track record is not obviously superior to the autistic one.
Reception
Richard E. Ashcroft reviewed the book in the journal Autism (2011), acknowledging its ambition while noting its reliance on contested cognitive science. Barbara Russell reviewed it in the American Journal of Bioethics (2010). Both reviews recognised the book as a serious philosophical effort while questioning its empirical foundations.
The response from autistic readers and scholars has been sharper. The book’s premise, that autistic people cannot fully participate in moral community, is experienced by autistic people as a statement about their personhood, not merely an academic exercise. Reviewers on Goodreads and in autistic community spaces have described it as “dangerously misleading” and as a book that “denies the existence of the Autistic community in the face of evidence to the contrary.”
The book’s own evidence sometimes undermines its thesis. Several of the autistic voices included in the text describe moral reasoning, empathic concern, and relational depth that sit uncomfortably with the framework Barnbaum uses to interpret them. This internal contradiction has been noted by multiple reviewers.
Where the field went instead
Barnbaum’s book was published in 2008. The decade that followed saw the field move in a direction almost opposite to the one she charted.
Hens, Robeyns, and Schaubroeck (2019) published “The ethics of autism” in Philosophy Compass, covering much of the same terrain but from a position informed by the neurodiversity paradigm, the capabilities approach, and the participatory turn in autism research. Their article treats autistic people as participants in the ethical conversation about their own lives, not as philosophical limit cases. The contrast with Barnbaum is instructive: same questions, different starting assumptions, radically different conclusions.
Chapman’s Empire of Normality (2023) and the broader critical autism studies movement have placed books like Barnbaum’s in historical context: products of a moment when the deficit model was the water the field swam in, and when it was possible to write an entire ethics of autism without noticing that the people being theorised about had their own, rather different, account of their experience.
Anderson and Cushing’s Contemporary Philosophy of Autism (2025) represents the current state of the field: a multi-authored volume that includes autistic philosophers writing from their own cognitive and experiential positions. The distance between that volume and Barnbaum’s is not just fifteen years. It is a paradigm shift.
What it is useful for
The book remains useful as a teaching case. If you want to understand what epistemic injustice looks like in practice, how an unexamined premise can structure an entire philosophical argument, or why participatory methods matter in research about marginalised communities, Barnbaum’s book provides a worked example. It is also, despite its flaws, a reasonably clear overview of the philosophical literature on autism as it stood in the mid-2000s.
The book should not be read as a guide to the ethics of autism. It should be read as a document of a particular moment in the field’s history, and as evidence for why the paradigm shift that followed was necessary.
Publication details
- Author: Deborah R. Barnbaum
- Title: The Ethics of Autism: Among Them, but Not of Them
- Series: Bioethics and the Humanities
- Publisher: Indiana University Press
- Year: 2008
- Pages: 233
- ISBN: 978-0-253-22013-4
Key reviews
- Ashcroft, R.E. (2011). Book review: The Ethics of Autism. Autism, 15(4), 515-516. doi: 10.1177/1362361309360447
- Russell, B. (2010). Review of The Ethics of Autism. The American Journal of Bioethics, 10(2), 70-71. doi: 10.1080/15265161003622089
Related reading
- Hens, K., Robeyns, I. and Schaubroeck, K. (2019). The ethics of autism. Philosophy Compass, 14(1), e12559. doi: 10.1111/phc3.12559
- Chapman, R. (2023). Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.
- Anderson, J. and Cushing, S. (Eds.). (2025). Contemporary Philosophy of Autism. London: Routledge.
- Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem.’ Disability & Society, 27(6), 883-887. doi: 10.1080/09687599.2012.710008