Ethical Issues with Applied Behavior Analysis: Past and Present

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In this webinar, we review our argument that a dominant form of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), which is widely taken to be far-and-away the best “treatment” for Autism Spectrum Disorder, manifests systematic violations of the fundamental tenets of bioethics. Moreover, the supposed benefits of the treatment not only fail to mitigate these violations, but often exacerbate them. Warnings of the perils of ABA are not original to us—autism advocates have been ringing this bell for some years. However, their pleas have been largely unheeded, and ABA continues to be offered to and quite frequently pushed upon parents as the appropriate treatment for autistic children. Our contribution is to argue that, from a bioethical perspective, autism advocates are fully justified in their concerns—the rights of autistic children and their parents are being regularly infringed upon. Specifically, we will argue that employing ABA violates the principles of justice and nonmaleficence and, most critically, infringes on the autonomy of children and (when pushed aggressively) of parents as well. We discuss some reactions to our article, and conclude with a modern legislative debate regarding the use of ABA in the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts.

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NJACE is funded in part by the New Jersey Governor’s Council for the Medical Research and Treatments of Autism and by the NJ DOH

The views expressed herein may not necessarily reflect the views of the NJACE or our partners, the Governor's Council for Medical Research and Treatments in Autism, the New Jersey Department of Health, and Children's Specialized Hospital.

The mission of the NJACE is to educate society about the neurobiology of autism, and autistic people‘s unmet needs across their lifespan. We do this by listening to the perspectives of autistic people, their parents and families, clinicians from interdisciplinary fields, and researchers from various fields including psychology, genetics, engineering, and computer science. We hope to build an all-inclusive community, which embraces autistic people as valued members of our society.