Refusing Their Lexicon: How Cambridge’s Autism Research Retools Fairness, Care, and Control

Autism, morality, and the quiet machinery of control.

Cambridge calls it fairness; we call it fidelity. This new “moral foundations” study from the Baron-Cohen cohort isn’t science—it’s soft eugenics in academic dress. Simon says be fair. We are—but not in their language.

Introduction: Tracking the Pattern

Greenberg, Y., Holt, R., Allison, C., Smith, P., Newman, R., Boardman-Pretty, T., Haidt, J., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2024). Moral foundations in autistic people and people with systemizing minds. Molecular Autism, 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-024-00591-8.

Simon says pay attention. I wasn’t looking for him today—not for Cambridge, not for another echo of the Empathising–Systemising machine—but there he was again, hiding in plain sight. I was searching for something else entirely, following a thread through the research library when his name appeared in the corner of the abstract like a watermark. Greenberg. Allison. Baron-Cohen. The same constellation. Different paper. This time it’s Molecular Autism, 2024. A new title, a new mask—“Moral foundations in autistic people and people with systemising minds”—but the same quiet ambition humming underneath: to define us, measure us, translate us back into the language of deficit and control.

That’s how it happens now. The old empire of autism research doesn’t march in columns anymore; it disperses. Papers scatter across journals like spores—genetics here, morality there, empathy, systemising, libertarianism—all linked by shared authorship and shared ontology. Each study speaks in the gentle tones of scientific curiosity, yet together they form a chorus of containment. They whisper of difference, not in the way we use the word—rich, lived, ecological—but as deviation from the supposed ‘human norm.’ Each new publication adds another layer to the myth of the autistic as moral puzzle: ethical but mechanical, rule-governed, uncertain in care.

I didn’t set out to find them today. But this is how it goes—the search for something unrelated becomes a reconnaissance mission. You start to see the pattern everywhere, like a watermark rising through the page. Cambridge fingerprints on moral psychology, on genetics, on policy. The network grows not through breakthrough but through repetition, through the sheer persistence of framing. They don’t need to say the quiet part anymore; the premise carries itself.

And so the work changes. It’s no longer enough to critique a single study or correct its phrasing. The task now is cartography—locating the nodes, charting the language, tracing how each seed embeds itself in the soil of policy and public understanding. It’s a matter of surveillance, but of a gentler kind—the vigilance of care. We’re not the ones who want to eliminate a genome; we’re the ones trying to preserve meaning against deletion. Each time I stumble upon one of these studies, I map it, file it, place it in the wider constellation of harm. They publish their canon; we build our counter-canon—our living record of how autistic thought persists, resists, and rewrites the field that seeks to erase it.

The Frame and the Question

“Do autistic people share the same moral foundations as typical people?” That’s how it begins—innocuous, almost polite. But there it is, the whole architecture of hierarchy folded neatly into a single sentence. Typical people as the measure of humanity, the ground against which all others are compared. The question does not seek understanding; it performs classification. It’s not curiosity—it’s gatekeeping dressed as inquiry, a passport check at the border of moral worth.

The language gives it away. The word share implies borrowing, as though morality were a cultural resource owned by the majority and occasionally lent to the deviant. The frame assumes what it pretends to test: that autistic morality might be something else, something less, something that needs proving. Beneath the statistics and scales, the question carries the same undertone that has haunted autism research since its inception—Are they really like us?

This is the Cambridge tradition in its most distilled form: to define by absence. Once it was empathy—our supposed deficit, their perennial obsession. Now the terrain has shifted to “moral foundations,” but the logic remains identical. Measure, compare, pathologise the difference. There’s a comfort for them in that symmetry: empathy gives way to morality, feeling to ethics, but the scaffold of lack remains. What they call science is often a taxonomy of distance.

To them, morality is something to be operationalised, extracted from questionnaires and factor analyses, cross-tabulated against empathy scores and political affiliations. But morality isn’t a data point—it’s the living pulse of relation. It moves through gesture, through care enacted rather than declared, through the unspoken ethics of not harming what you love. Yet in the hands of this cohort, morality becomes diagnostic, a way to reassert control over the moral narrative itself.

What emerges, once again, is the same mirror trick: autistic people positioned as the foil through which “typical humanity” recognises itself. Their science is never neutral. It’s an act of purification—scrubbing the human clean of the autistic, to keep the boundaries of the normal intact. And so the study’s question isn’t about moral foundations at all. It’s about moral authority—who gets to define it, who gets to keep it, and who must endlessly prove their place within it.

Instruments of Measurement: Moral Foundations Theory

The instrument of choice is the Moral Foundations Questionnaire—an artefact pretending to be a mirror of human virtue. Born of American culture-war psychology and baptised in Cambridge’s empire of measurement, it arrives dressed in neutrality yet hums with ideology. Five pillars, they call them: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity. A tidy architecture for moral life, drafted in the language of survey logic and political geometry. Each foundation maps neatly onto a partisan spectrum—liberal compassion and fairness on one side, conservative loyalty and sanctity on the other—with Authority sitting like a throne at the centre.

It’s Rule Britannia by way of Harvard and Cambridge, the Empire’s moral code dressed as universal truth. The questionnaire is less a measure of conscience than a loyalty test—its hidden question always the same: why won’t these silly autistics remain faithful to hierarchy? Why do they keep defying the social order, refusing to kneel before authority, refusing to swallow sanctity whole? Their model cannot account for moral resistance; it was never built to. It assumes that goodness is obedience, that morality aligns with deference, that fairness itself is a function of rule-following. Autistic justice, with its insistence on reciprocity and consistency, its refusal to flatter power, becomes a kind of heresy.

And yet the test insists on translation. Its questions require abstraction, metaphor, the parsing of moral scenarios into the clean logic of Likert scales. To complete it, one must already speak their dialect—the analytic idiom of academic English, detached from body, context, and pulse. It measures not moral life but linguistic assimilation: how well one can reframe sensory knowing into propositional form, how closely one can mimic the voice of analytic reason. The very tools they wield to measure morality are shaped by the same colonial machinery that erased indigenous and embodied ways of knowing—this time aimed inward, at neurodivergent minds.

The result tells them what they already believe. Autistics, insufficiently reverent, are coded as low on loyalty and authority. The data hums a tune they recognise: empire justified by deviation. Our fairness—our refusal to lie, to comply, to tolerate hypocrisy—reads as malfunction. But perhaps what they mistake for moral deficit is simply a different fidelity: not to power, but to truth. And that is the one foundation their questionnaire cannot hold.

The Binary Machine: Empathising and Systemising

The Empathising–Systemising framework runs through the study like an old myth pretending to be a model. It claims to describe minds; what it really describes is hierarchy. The binary it constructs—reason versus feeling, logic versus care—did not originate in the lab. It is the same dualism that carved the world into rulers and ruled, masculine and feminine, civilised and primitive. Cambridge merely repackages the myth in the language of neuroscience. Under the microscope, it looks like science; under the light, it’s theology.

In this schema, autism is always cast on the “systemising” side: rational but cold, precise but loveless, moral only by rule. It is the Enlightenment’s favourite monster—the creature of reason stripped of soul. The category serves a dual purpose: to salvage the image of the autistic as useful (the rule-follower, the engineer, the logical savant) whilst withholding full humanity. They let us exist as partial beings—thinking machines with moral software, not moral selves. The binary functions as border control: empathy is citizenship; systemising is the visa that must be renewed with proof of productivity.

The trick is always linguistic. “Intact affective empathy,” they say, as though to praise. But the compliment conceals the wound. Intact implies damage narrowly avoided; affective empathy becomes the small mercy we’re allowed, a pocket of feeling preserved inside the otherwise barren landscape of our cognition. The phrase performs reassurance for the neurotypical reader: don’t worry, they can still care, just differently, just less. It is a rhetorical containment field—permission to acknowledge emotion without relinquishing the deficit narrative.

Yet what they call “systemising” is, in truth, something older and more organic: pattern-sense, ecological reasoning, the felt symmetry of the world. To live as autistic is not to be cold but to perceive warmth in structure, justice in precision, care in the constancy of pattern. What they mistake for logic is often love rendered differently—a love that resists distortion, that cannot flatter power or feign indifference. The binary machine cannot compute that kind of empathy because it was never designed to. Its function is to reproduce the myth of separation—reason against feeling, self against other—so that the empire of normalcy can continue to name itself whole.

The Fairness Fetish

Their headline finding—autistic participants favour Fairness over Care—lands with the triumphant certainty of revelation, as though they have cracked the moral code of the autistic mind. But look closer and the word Fairness begins to dissolve. In their lexicon, it does not mean justice or equity; it means proportionality, adherence to rule, precision of exchange. Fairness as calibration, not conscience. Care, by contrast, is rendered soft, sentimental, unquantifiable—less mature, less rational, less scientific. And so the hierarchy reasserts itself: the moral adult obeys rules; the moral child feels.

This is the fetish at the heart of the study—fairness as order, rule-following elevated to virtue. It is a moral theory designed by administrators. The clean lines of Cambridge logic are visible everywhere: balance sheets of virtue, symmetry mistaken for justice. They praise autistic participants for their apparent rule-based morality without asking what the rules are or who wrote them. To follow a rule is, in their system, to behave well; to question it is to disrupt the hierarchy. Thus the “good autistic” becomes the compliant one—the reliable worker-bee of morality, precise but unthreatening.

Yet what they call rule-following is often something else entirely. Autistic fairness is not deference to authority; it is fidelity to truth. It is a visceral recoil from hypocrisy, from arbitrary power disguised as order. The rules we honour are not the ones handed down by institutions but the ones that hold the world together—reciprocity, transparency, coherence. To mistake that fidelity for compliance is to project their own imperial desire onto our ethics.

Cambridge’s celebration of our “rule-based” morality reveals less about us than about them. It tells of an institution that cannot imagine morality without control, care without hierarchy, fairness without subordination. Their idea of justice is the smooth running of the system; ours is the refusal to participate in its harm. When they say we favour Fairness over Care, what they mean is that our empathy does not serve their order. We care too much about the wrong things—the truth, the powerless, the unspoken—and not enough about keeping the Empire tidy.

Numbers as Theology

The numbers, when you finally reach them, are unremarkable. Differences so small they could vanish in the rounding, effect sizes barely whispering above zero. Yet the paper treats them as scripture—tiny deviations transubstantiated into meaning. Statistical noise becomes moral revelation. A p-value flickers below .05 and the authors bow their heads, declaring discovery. Fairness trumps Care, they say, as though a decimal place could illuminate the soul.

This is the theology of numbers, and Cambridge remains its cathedral. The ritual goes like this: collect the data, extract the slimmest glimmer of distinction, sanctify it through repetition. The smaller the difference, the greater the claim—because smallness implies subtlety, sophistication, a truth so delicate it requires expert interpretation. To the untrained reader, it sounds precise. To those of us who have lived under its gaze, it sounds familiar. The difference must be maintained, even if it has to be conjured.

They rely on the quiet faith that most people will never read beyond the abstract—that the headlines and press releases will do the work. Autistic people see fairness differently. Moral reasoning differs in the autistic brain. The words drift through news cycles and policy briefings, finding their way into classrooms, clinics, algorithms. The public absorbs the message, not the margin of error. The study’s real outcome is not data but discourse. It keeps autism measurable, containable, forever almost human but never quite the same.

That is the quiet function of this entire apparatus: to preserve the category even when the evidence erodes beneath it. When the numbers refuse to support the myth, the myth simply re-describes the numbers. In their theology, the absence of difference becomes the difference. The autistic mind must remain a distinct moral variant, not because the data say so, but because the system requires it.

The Political Drift

The paper takes a curious turn. Having established its fragile hierarchy of moral foundations, it wanders suddenly into politics—as if moral reasoning could be plotted on a spectrum of party allegiance. Autistic people, or those with “systemising minds,” they suggest, show tendencies toward libertarianism. The leap is extraordinary. From a questionnaire about fairness to an ideological classification. From moral nuance to political taxonomy. What begins as psychological description ends as political sorting—a dataset reinterpreted as citizenship profile.

This is not an accident. It is the next move in the Cambridge playbook: to translate autistic cognition into political behaviour, to claim predictive authority over how we vote, how we think, how we resist. The research reframes our independence—our need for autonomy, our resistance to arbitrary rule—as libertarian self-interest, stripping it of its ethical roots. Autistic integrity becomes capitalist rationalism; our refusal to conform becomes proof that we are market creatures after all, guided not by empathy but by self-regulation and logic.

In their telling, our difference ceases to be threat and becomes instrument. The solitary forager is reimagined as the ideal neoliberal subject: efficient, rule-abiding, unentangled. Cambridge provides the moral alibi for this transformation—an academic halo over the politics of enclosure. Under the guise of science, they build the intellectual scaffolding for policies that will privatise care and dismantle collective responsibility. If autistic people are predisposed toward libertarian values, the state can retreat without guilt. Support becomes interference. Dependency becomes moral failure.

This is dangerous ground, and they tread it with the calm authority of expertise. A paragraph on political identification here, a statistical correlation there—and the stage is set for translation into policy language. We have seen this before. Research becomes evidence; evidence becomes justification. What began as a study of “moral foundations” will be cited to defend budget cuts, to legitimise surveillance, to frame autistic adults as self-reliant and anti-collective. The logic spreads quietly, from journal to think tank to government white paper.

This is how science becomes statecraft. Not through overt conspiracy, but through ideological osmosis—the slow seep of data into doctrine. Cambridge supplies the research; ministries supply the mandate. Each claim of difference hardens into policy rationale. Each phrase about “libertarian tendencies” becomes a bullet point in a funding brief.

The cruelty is elegant. They turn our ethics against us. What is, in truth, a deep moral clarity—a refusal to manipulate, to coerce, to lie—is recast as the very ideology that will harm us most. In their frame, our independence ceases to be relational, communal, or sensory; it becomes a brand of moral minimalism. They teach the world to read autistic integrity as indifference, autistic honesty as austerity, autistic justice as deregulation.

It is not neutrality—it is narrative warfare. The old project of eugenics has evolved. It no longer seeks to eliminate us directly, but to reprogramme our image so that exclusion appears as autonomy, abandonment as freedom. They call it research. I call it preparation. A groundwork for the next decade of policy, the next phase of managed extinction—conducted not through violence this time, but through the quiet sanctity of data.

The Unmeasured Foundations

They are the lexicographers again, standing at the edge of our world with clipboards in hand. They do not know what they see, yet they record it anyway. Each question on their survey another attempted translation, another effort to convert something living into data that fits their frame. They have mistaken their measurements for meaning, their scales for sight. They name what they do not understand and congratulate themselves for having “decoded” it.

What this study cannot see are the foundations that do not fit their instruments—mutual aid, reciprocity, ecological attunement, integrity of gesture, sensory truth. The autistic moral world moves through resonance, not rule. It is a world of tacit agreements and unspoken honesty, of caring without choreography, of noticing the fragile balance of things and feeling accountable to it. The forms of morality that animate autistic life—pattern fidelity, emotional exactness, a refusal to falsify meaning—cannot be captured by self-report scales because they are not performed for recognition. They are lived, embodied, constant.

But the lexicographers cannot hear this music. They measure for tempo, not tone. They ask whether we value loyalty or authority, unaware that our loyalty is to coherence, and our authority is the pattern itself. They chart our “moral preferences” as though these could be weighed against those of the neurotypical majority, missing entirely that our ethics are not transactional—they are relational, ecological, rhythmical. When we speak of fairness, we mean balance; when we speak of care, we mean truth. These are not abstractions but sensory laws, felt through the skin and the air between words.

Their blindness is not malicious so much as habitual. Like the lexicographer in the fae lands, they arrive convinced that order equals understanding. They take the hum of the forest for noise, the shimmer of meaning for distortion. And when their instruments fail to detect the pulse of our world, they report absence. “Low empathy,” “reduced moral comprehension,” “rule-based reasoning.” The vocabulary of deficit is simply the record of their deafness.

Autistic morality is not the logic of law—it is the logic of resonance. It asks, does this action preserve the pattern, the balance, the integrity of the whole? It is fidelity, not obedience. To call this “rule-based” is to confuse echo with repetition, harmony with compliance. The fae child’s song was not random; it was attuned. But the outsider, hearing only chaos, wrote her down as aberrant.

The same story continues. They name us by what they cannot perceive. We live by what their language cannot hold. And still they write their dictionaries—cold, confident, incomplete—while we keep singing in frequencies they cannot measure, building our ethics out of resonance, honesty, and care that asks nothing in return.

Counter-Mapping: Reading the Network

Zoom out and the picture sharpens. This paper is not an event; it is a tile—one tessera in a mosaic of control. You start to see the grout lines: ARC affiliations threaded through author lists; the same measures wheeled out again; theories citing their own family tree until the loop closes. What looks like diversity of inquiry is often a hall of mirrors—culture-war psychology refracted through Cambridge tone, then bounced back as confirmation.

The signatures repeat. ARC on the masthead. MFQ in the methods. E–S as the interpretive lens. A sprinkling of “intact affective empathy” to soften the blow, then the familiar drift toward political inference. Recycled samples. Parallel abstracts. Press-office language already optimised for headlines. The network has learned how to write for uptake—how to move from journal to newswire to policy memo without ever touching ground.

Call it scientific seeding. Flood the literature with aligned studies until citation itself becomes a form of enclosure. Once enough papers exist inside the frame, the frame becomes the evidence. Editors lean on what’s “established,” reviewers ask for alignment with the “field,” and young scholars learn the house style or perish. By the time the public arrives, the footnotes are already paved.

So the counter-work must be cartographic, not merely reactive. Map the authorship graph—who publishes with whom, under which centre, with what reviewer acknowledgements and advisory roles. Track the measures—where they originate, how they travel, which papers validate which tools, and whether validation ever leaves the same ideological weather system. Follow the money—grant numbers, foundation patrons, industrial partners, consultancy disclosures—then lay those flows alongside topic choice and outcome language.

Build an index of motifs: “typical people,” “systemising minds,” “rule-based morality,” “libertarian tendencies.” Watch how these phrases migrate across abstracts and into media copy. Note preregistration status, effect sizes, the ratio of statistical significance to practical meaning. Catalogue press releases for hype-inflation—how small deltas become big claims in the newsroom sentence.

Construct the meta-map. A living ledger of ARC-linked outputs, their cross-citations, their replication record, their policy afterlife. Visualise clusters; mark the bridges into adjacent domains—genetics, education, policing, AI ethics. Show where the same handful of names sit on editorial boards, grant panels, standards committees. Illuminate the pipeline from study to statute.

Then seed our own ground. Commission post-publication reviews grounded in autistic expertise. Publish counter-summaries that travel as quickly as their press kits. Create shared libraries—annotated and searchable—so that teachers, clinicians, and journalists have an alternative stack at hand. Pair every recurrent claim with a standing rebuttal and a standing reframe.

Above all, refuse to fight paper by paper. Expose the system that births them—the affiliations, the instruments, the incentives—and make that architecture the story. When readers can see the network, the spell breaks. The mosaic stops looking like reality and starts looking like design.

Closing: Refusing Their Lexicon

Simon says be fair. That’s their closing command, the refrain beneath every paper—the invitation to behave as they define behaviour, to live by the metrics of balance they have built for themselves. But fairness, in our language, is not compliance. It is not proportionality or even-handed arithmetic. It is a kind of sensory equilibrium—a felt balance in the field of being, where justice hums through bodies and gestures rather than statutes. Fairness is the restoration of resonance, the quiet refusal to distort what is true.

Care, in that same grammar, is gravity. It draws us toward one another, toward the parts of the world that ache. It does not measure; it listens. It gathers harm and redistributes tenderness until weight becomes shared. Justice is not imposed from above but generated horizontally, through vibration, through response. It is resonance moving through the field, restoring coherence where power has fractured it.

So when they tell us to be fair, we answer—we are, but not in your language. Our fairness is not the cleanliness of rules but the persistence of relation. It refuses hierarchy. It corrects imbalance by sensing it, not by calculating it. It is the fairness of ecosystems, not courts; the care of rivers, not governments.

This is where the work returns to vigilance. The network they’ve built depends on our fatigue—on our silence, on our trust that someone else is watching. But we are watchers now. We trace the lines of authorship and funding, the subtle shifts in tone, the phrases that travel from study to press release to policy. We keep maps, and we share them. We stay awake to the pattern.

Because fairness, in our world, is not a moral command—it’s an act of kinship. It is keeping each other in the field of awareness, refusing erasure, refusing the flattening lexicon. Simon says be fair. We already are. But the fairness we practise cannot be standardised. It lives in resonance, in truth, in the small, defiant continuities that keep the world alive.