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.
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.