Doing Right and

Being Good:
What It Would Take
for People Living with
Autism to Flourish
Nancy Nyquist Potter

Keywords: good deliberation, prudence (phronesis), low severity of Asperger’s syndrome—can go on

virtuous feelings, non-ideal eudaimonism to flourish. I am skeptical of their conclusions.
The first reservation concerns their understand-
ing of Aristotelian flourishing and the second, the

F
urman and Tuminello (2015) raise a method by which they claim that children with
central question about people living with Asperger’s can flourish. My conclusion is that the
mental illness: What kind of life is possible methods and claims of ABA do not warrant an
for them? Can one live a flourishing life even when application of Aristotle’s flourishing life.
struggling with a mental disorder? The authors
draw on research studies to argue that a technique The Virtues And Flourishing
called Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) can im-
Aristotle’s theory of virtue holds us to high
prove the lives of children with autism. One study,
standards: to be virtuous, we must consistently
from 1987, found that 47% of children exposed
reason well both in terms of good deliberation
to ABA attained normal IQ levels, adaptive skills,
and in terms of becoming and being the sort of
and social skills, and other studies replicated these
person who feels and acts rightly. When Furman
results. This is a promising avenue for those living
and Tuminello say that “the child might begin to
with autism.
apply his scientific reasoning towards more prac-
Furman and Tuminello focus on autism, but
tical matters and develop the virtues of thought
their claims, if true, might be extended to other
craftsmanship and prudence” (p. 260), they con-
disorders as well; as they note, people with autism
fuse Aristotle’s different kinds of thought with the
exhibit extremes of excess and deficiency, and these
one kind that is related to flourishing (Aristotle
characteristics also apply to people with border-
1999, Bk.VI). Aristotle distinguishes the scientific
line personality disorder and those with bipolar
part of the soul from the rationally calculating
disorder, so it matters whether or not Furman and
part. Scientific knowledge and craftsmanship have
Tuminello’s claims are right. The authors argue
their own virtues, but not the sort of virtue that
that some autistic children—namely, those with a
concerns action, and action is what virtue ethics

© 2016 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

264 ■ PPP / Vol. 22, No. 4 / December 2015
is concerned about. Scientific knowledge does not
admit of being otherwise and, hence, is not open to
deliberation, and craftsmanship does not involve
action but production. Only prudence (phronesis)
is a virtue in the sense of it being the state of the
soul that helps lead us to flourishing. (Aristotle
makes this clearest in 1999, Bk. VI.9; see also Dahl
1984.) Prudence requires good deliberation about
what is good or bad for human beings (Aristotle
1999, 1140b10). It is a kind of correctness in
reasoning, but not just any kind of correctness, as
even a base person can reason correctly. That is
not all it takes to have good deliberation: “Having
deliberated well seems, on the contrary, to be some
sort of good; for the sort of correctness in delib-
eration that makes it good deliberation is the sort
that reaches a good” (Aristotle 1999, 1142b22).
The good that is reached is not one just for the
individual and regardless of whether it is fine to
do. The good must be an objectively good action
given the context in which the situation arises, the
parties involved, and so on. In other words, good
deliberation is unequivocally ethical: it implicates
the sorts of persons we are, how we treat others,
and what matters to us at our deepest level.
These clarifications are significant in evaluat-
ing Furman and Tuminello’s claims. For Aristotle,
good deliberation is not simply that which finds
the most effective means to some end; it is that
which contributes to flourishing. Furthermore,
prudence and virtues of character are integrally
connected; as Aristotle says, “we cannot be fully
good without prudence, or prudent without virtue
of character” (Aristotle 1999, 1144b32). And
virtue of character requires that we be moved by
feelings as well as by the rational desire to per-
form the right action (Aristotle 1999, Bk. ii.6).
The internalization of correct emotional states is
imperative to Aristotelian virtue theory; we cannot
live well as social beings without proper emotional
engagement with others (Sherman 1989). Another
way to put the point is that what is produced
through craft is good if the product has the right
qualities, but the same does not hold for actions
(Aristotle 1105a27-35). Good actions must be
done from the correct state, and that state includes
that the virtuous person has the right feelings in
a given situation.
I emphasize these more theoretical points be-
cause they bear directly on Furman and Tuminel-
lo’s claims that people with Asperger’s syndrome
can flourish. Furman and Tuminello claim that
ABA can teach children to reason well enough
that many of them eventually can live a flourishing
life. Given their description of how virtue works,
it sounds more like craft production than either
prudence or virtue of character. The authors cite
evidence that ABA can teach some autistic children
to lead better lives. By this they mean that some
children, through ABA, can learn to become less
given to extremes and more socially engaged. In
describing how ABA might work for children
with least severe forms of autism, the authors
say that the result is “behaviors mirroring social
norms” (p. 258, emphasis added). ABA works by
“manipulating a subject’s environment” (p. 256).
This approach results in changes that are external
to the sort of person one is.
The children they describe may learn to find
the mean in reasoning about houses and other
problems in overselectivity. This is not a skill in the
virtue of thought that Aristotle calls ‘prudence.’
They may acquire social skills. But unless those
social skills are accompanied by the right feelings,
they are a species of craft production, not virtue.
Take friendliness, for example. This is a virtue the
authors worked through in the general discussion
of virtue but not as applied to people with autism.
What would friendliness look like for people with
autism who have been treated with ABA? If they
find the mean for friendliness but do not feel
friendly, then they do not have the virtue.
The question the authors face is whether there is
any more to ABA training than developing a skill
set by which people with autism can cope better
in the world. ‘Getting by’ (even ‘getting by’ better
than otherwise) is an improvement in their lives,
but it is not the same as the deep internal structure
of virtue that Aristotle requires for a person to be
said to ‘have’ the virtue.
Doing Right And Being Good
Virtue theorists make a distinction between do-
ing and being. Doing the right thing is primarily a
modernist approach to ethics, where the purpose
of ethical theory is to guide people toward choos-

ing the right action to perform. This is one of the
ways that Aristotle’s virtue ethics is distinguished
from consequentialist ones. For Mill’s utilitarian-
ism, for example, it does not matter how one feels
or why one does a right action: what makes an
action right is that it produces the best state of
affairs, or at least a better one, than all available
alternatives. The motive behind doing right does
not matter to the rightness of the action. Aristo-
tle rejects such a view. Virtue theories, whether
Aristotle’s or contemporary ones, emphasize the
centrality of being a virtuous person through and
through. This means that not only does the virtu-
ous person perform right actions, but that she
does so from an emotional center and with the
intellectual virtue of prudence.
Furman and Tuminello have given us reasons to
be optimistic about helping those with Asperger’s
and autism to live improved lives. But their claim
that their bettered lives are lives of flourishing is
too strong—they would not meet the criteria for
virtue of character or of thought. Their problem
is with the concept of flourishing they use: for
people with autism to flourish, they would need to
diminish radically the very problems that charac-
terize their dysfunctions. In particular, they would
need to be able to “be afraid, for instance, or be
confident, or have appetites, or get angry, or feel
pity, and in general have pleasure or pain . . . [in
general, to have these] feelings at the right times,
about the right things, toward the right people, for
the right end, and in the right way…” (Aristotle
1999, 1106b16-15). As I say, Aristotle’s account
of virtue requires a way of being, in terms of feel-
ings, actions, and deliberation, that is internal
to the structure of the personality. A change in
problems such as connecting socially and rela-
tionally to others may just amount to eradicating
the dysfunction—a possibility that Furman and
Tuminello seem to deny. If they were to jettison
the idea that living well with autism requires
flourishing, they would be in a more persuasive
position. I am all in favor of the aim of helping
people with mental disorders live better lives (be-
yond just hanging on by their fingernails), but we
need to be clear on what we mean by ‘better’ and
what it would take to move beyond an external-
ist approach to functioning better with respect to
individual people and different diagnoses.
Potter / Flourishing with Autism ■ 265
That said, I believe that Aristotle has set the
bar too high in his explication of eudaimonia.
Although I regularly draw on his theory of virtue,
I nevertheless believe that Aristotle’s ideal of flour-
ishing is not achievable by the majority of people
in the world. As Lisa Tessman (2005) argues, in
our world, structural inequalities and devastating
disadvantages and disabilities prevent people from
being virtuous in ways that actually enhance their
own flourishing. This fact about the world we live
in applies to people living with autism, too. Those
who struggle with autism are not generic people;
their existence is shaped and constrained by their
race, gender, and class. This means that the extent
to which people with autism can live better lives
with the intervention of ABA will be mediated not
only by the severity of their disorder, but also by
the degree to which their lives are advantaged or
disadvantaged by the structural order of life in
various societies. Neither Tessman nor I reject the
value of flourishing but, as Tessman argues, the dis-
advantaged need a non-ideal eudaimonistic virtue
ethics and an ethics in general that recognizes the
impossible demands that are placed on people and
thus set us up for moral failure (see Potter in press;
Tessman 2009, 2015). Even so, I believe that being
good requires the internalization of ethical and
social norms. I leave a discussion of where those
norms come from and how to decide which norms
are good ones for another time (Potter in press).
References
Aristotle. 1999. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin.
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Dahl, N. 1984. Practical reason, Aristotle, and weakness
of the will. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Furman, T. M., and A. Tuminello. 2015. Aristotle,
autism, and applied behavior analysis. Philosophy,
Psychiatry, & Psychology 22, no. 4:253–62.
Potter, N. N. In Press. The virtue of defiance and psychi-
atric engagement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sherman, N. 1989. The fabric of character: Aristotle’s
theory of virtue. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Tessman, L. 2005. Burdened virtues: Virtue ethics for
liberatory struggles. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
———. 2009. Feminist eudaimonism as non-ideal
theory. In Feminist ethics and social and political
philosophy: Theorizing the non-ideal, ed. L. Tess-
man, 47-58. New York: Springer.
———. 2015. Moral failure: On the impossible de-
mands of morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.