Let's stick with criminal law here. One obvious reason why "immoral" doesn't entail "illegal" is that what's legal, what's not, and what the punishments are needs to be clear. In a functioning legal system, it's generally possible to determine in advance whether something is a crime, and in cases where it's not clear, there's a system for settling the matter, with various safeguards and forms of appeal built in. But there are plenty of moral loose ends — matters on which people disagree, sometimes vehemently, about whether something is immoral.

We might try restricting things by saying that actions which are clearly immoral should be illegal. Unfortunately, however, that doesn't move the ball as far as it would need to go. When people disagree vehemently about moral matters, one side typically thinks something is clearly immoral and the other side that it clearly isn't. Few of us would want to live in a state where we might be subject to imprisonment because some judge judges that something we think is moral is actually immoral. I may think that a statutory law is a bad one, but I can at least know in advance what the law actually is and work to get it changed if I want to.

In addition to these more general reasons, there's sheer practicality. Legal systems aren't meant to address all problems or govern all behavior, and thank Heavens for that. For one thing, the resources it would take to enforce all of morality through the law would be extraordinary, and better spent in other ways. But also, most people — I'm one — think that there should be a sphere of life that's outside the reach of the State. If morality is entirely swallowed up by the law, that sphere will shrink to almost nothing. And again: I suspect that very few of us would want to live in a country like that.

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.

Interesting.

To make the case clear, let's assume that no matter which of your only two options you pick, there will be seriously bad consequences. And let's agree that this makes both choices bad choices. There's nothing odd to the ear about the phrase "My only options are bad ones." But now let's add another assumption: the consequences of robbing the bank, though genuinely bad, would not be nearly as bad as the consequences of letting your children starve. Though I can imagine certain sorts of objections about long-term consequences, set those aside. Surely it's possible for one thing to be less bad than another, even if both things are bad. Killing someone may be bad; killing them in their sleep is less bad (to put it mildly) than torturing them to death over a period of several days.

I'd suggest that we can add another premise—a moral premise: if you have no alternative to doing either X or Y, and if X is clearly worse than Y, you should do Y.

As we've set things up, it seems to follow that you should rob the bank. And if you really were in a situation like this, surely that's what would matter.

But, you ask, is that the correct decision—the right decision?

Well, given the alternative, as your wife says, it's the right decision in the sense of being the thing you should do, all things considered. It's not a thing that good in itself; it's not a thing that you should do if there were a better alternative; it's not something that it would normally be right to do; it doesn't avoid wronging anyone. But as things work out, it's still what you should do. What, exactly, is left to argue about?

Well, harming others who've done nothing to deserve it is a wrong. But the word "wrong" is subtle. Robbing the bank can be a wrong, and yet not be the wrong thing to do given the alternatives. We can say that; it makes sense of the situation. And I suspect that you and your wife agree about it.

We could quibble about exactly how to use the words "wrong" or "incorrect," or "right," for that matter. But quibbling is exactly what that would be. Both choices are bad choices, yet one is less bad than the other, and that's the one you should pick. If that's agreed, then what really matters is settled. There's no deep philosophical fact about precisely which way of using words like "wrong" is really right.

We could say a lot or a little about this; a little is best, I think.

The word "cult" has a pretty fuzzy meaning, but my read is that it tends to be used for relatively fringe-y religious groups with highly uniform beliefs well outside the mainstream, and with high accompanying demands for group-think. QAnon isn't really a religious group, though its adherents do have a sort of religious zeal. Their beliefs are shockingly more popular than they deserve to be, though they're still (I hope!) not mainstream. And there certainly appears to be near-monolithic agreement about many of these beliefs.

Christianity is a lot more complicated. Some parts of it are cultish in the worst possible senses. But the differences between some fundamentalist Christian sects and, say, liberal Episcopalians is a chasm so vast that members of the two groups are likely to find each other more or less incomprehensible.

Put it another way: there seems to be a great deal in the way of generalizations that one can make about QAnon adherents. But contrary to what many non-religious people may think, this is much less true of Christianity. Some Christians think that Jesus was born of a virgin, and some don't. Some believe that Jesus rose bodily from the dead and some don't. Some think that only those who explicitly profess Christianity can be saved. Others don't. Some see evolution as the Devil's tool. Others accept evolution and the rest of science without qualms. The list could go on, and on, and on.

Because it's easy to make tolerably accurate generalizations about QAnon and hard to do the same for Christianity, it's difficult to justify blanket condemnations of Christianity. And I think that's the crucial point. QAnon is, more or less, one thing. Christianity is many things. And so lumping them together is not really helpful.

Briefly, I think you're right that there's an incompatibility between the two philosophical movements you describe. One turns on disinterested reasoning; the other denies that reasoning of that kind is possible. Be careful, however. If you mean by two different logics, two different ways of thinking through philosophical issues, then yes. I think that's right. Note, though, that many will use "logic" in the narrower sense of reasoning based on standard deductive and inductive logical principles. About it being a logical fallacy to reject an argument on the basis of the person advancing it, note that doing so is what philosophers call an "informal" fallacy. There may be nothing formally invalid or weak in the dismissive reasoning that appeals to the person, simply because there are times when the person is relevant. Sometimes genesis matters. You may have to look at the particulars to decide whether or not that's so for any given argument.

Now, the two approaches you describe can be made less incompatible by treating identitarian concerns as grounds for suspicion and heightened scrutiny but not sufficient grounds for rejecting an argument. We use genetic appeals to credentials, expertise, and track record all the time to make probabilistic judgments about claims and arguments. A well trained and experienced physician is more likely than me to be right about whether or not someone suffers from a particular illness. Albert Einstein would be more likely than me to make correct claims about relativity. But in each case, not necessarily so.

The idea that the oppressed hold a superior epistemic position to that of the oppressor is often related to Hegel's master-slave dialectic, if you want the background. But note that the principle doesn't apply to all cases. Sometimes privilege grants one a better epistemic standpoint (for example, the privilege of attending medical school), sometimes it doesn't (e.g., the blinders produced by an insular life lived only among others of the dominant class). When it comes to the question of whether identity, social position, and generally the person matters, the Devil's in the details.

I agree with my colleague that "Only if A, then B" is not idiomatic English, and so it's hard to know what your teacher meant. In teaching logic over the years, I've seen many examples that take this form: "Only if A, B" — leaving the word "then" out. An English example might be the somewhat stilted but acceptable "Only if you're at least 18 are you eligible to vote." That's the same as saying "You are eligible to vote only if you're at least 18." And that's different from saying "If you're at least 18, you're eligible to vote." Saying "If you're at least 18, you're eligible to vote" means that there are no other qualifications needed; being 18 or older is enough. Saying "You're eligible to vote only if you're at least 18" allows that there may be other requirements as well, such as being a citizen. So if what your teacher meant was "Only if A, B," then perhaps my example shows that this isn't the same as "If A then B."

You raise a very important topic today, and an interesting topic any day. Maybe it would help for me to respond with some questions that I have on this issue: Why should what's striking to students matter in determining curriculum? Is what's "striking" a sound criterion for either professors or students in selecting texts and topics? What makes you think philosophy is about what's "striking"? Should we ask what reasons a teacher might have for telling a student to scrap their work, if and when that happens; or is it sufficient to note their racial identities? What are the "personal elements" that "always" come with writing? Are they relevant to philosophy? How? Is the claim that "writing always comes with personal elements" personal for you but not others in philosophy? If it's just about you personally, what bearing does it have on philosophy and writing more generally? Why should anyone else care? Should maths be "sensitive to racial, class, gender, or personal, perspectives"? Should the (other) sciences? If philosophy is different from the empirical and formal sciences, how so? Is logic somehow personal? Is truth? Is wisdom? How do you know? Is the fact that a group of philosophers belong to the same race sufficient reason to conclude that their work somehow reflects their race and that their students are improperly limited in their inquiries? I don't know if these questions are at all meaningful to you, but thanks for helping to raise them for me.

There's way too much to be said here for one short post, but a handful of points.

First, As a straight, white male I'm pretty confident that there's a lot that I don't understand about what it's like to live in the country I live in (the US) as a woman, or as a Black person, or as a gay man, or transgender person, or as a lesbian or... This seems both unremarkable and important. It's unremarkable because we all are familiar with the fact that one's circumstances can sometimes make it easier to see or understand certain things. Lived experience does make a difference, and the difference it makes can be important.

For example: I suspect that a great many of the people who put in place the "separate but equal" regime that finally began to crumble with Brown v. Board of Education were pretty clueless about what "separate but equal" was like for Black Americans and therefore, about whether "separate but equal" was even a serious possibility. That's hardly a shocking thing to say. Correlatively, my pronouncements on what it's like to be Black or female or... should rightly be viewed with some initial suspicion. I'm likely to say things that reflect the limits of my experience.

Second, there aren't two logics here. When we reason, we need premises. And when we gather the information that feeds into our premises, we will inevitably make choices about which sources we draw from and trust. Our premises don't come to us as a gift from reasoning gods.

Third, recognizing that people's situations and experiences can be important sources of knowledge doesn't mean that the experiences of some member of some group lead them infallibly to the truth. It also doesn't mean that things about one's identity and experience never gets in the way of seeing things as they are. Taking the importance of intersectional identity and experience seriously doesn't mean that those are the only valid sources of knowledge and insight.

Fourth, no one needs to say that members of non-oppressed groups have no access to knowledge/insight into the lives of members of groups they don't belong to. I suppose some people might claim that, but so what? For just about any over-stated view you can find some people who hold it.

How all of this works out in practice is messy and hard. I'm convinced that my relatively privileged position has made it harder for me to understand a lot of things that I need to understand. I also hear people (perhaps not least politicians and people with power) saying things that suggest they don't get it. But I don't think the idea that there are two different "logics" here is helpful. There's the messy world that we all have partial perspectives on. Being privileged in various ways can create epistemic barriers. So, however, can being poor or oppressed. Analysis matters, and experience matters. Certain kinds of experience, I'm quite convinced, haven't been paid sufficient attention. While the details are hard, the broad points aren't radical.

It sounds to me as though your teacher may be using the awkward expression "Only if A, then B" as a way of asserting the biconditional "A if and only if B," which is equivalent to the biconditional "B if and only if A." As I say, the expression is awkward, but in any case I wouldn't read it as adding a modal operator like "Necessarily" to the conditional "If A, then B." Whoever wants to say "necessarily" really needs to use that word.

Other than your teacher's decision, I can't think of any reason to treat "Only if A, then B" as the biconditional "A if and only if B." The form "Only if A, then B" isn't something you'll encounter in idiomatic English. Competent speakers wouldn't say, "Only if all humans are mortals, then all nonmortals are nonhuman." Instead, they'd say "All humans are mortals if and only if all nonmortals are nonhumans." But it's probably wise to follow your teacher's decision, at least until you're done with the course!