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Much controversy surrounds the meaning of autism and how to help autistic people and their families cope with related challenges. This analysis compares four classic attribution models of moral responsibility for the causes of and solutions to problems, using for each model an example from how parents or autistic people have viewed and addressed autism. Accordingly, under the new application of the moral model, parents have been wrongly blamed for causing autism, isolating and sometimes breaking apart families. Parents led a paradigm shift to the medical model, under which neither parents nor autistic people are at fault for autism’s emergence, and they must seek help from medical authorities to treat it using practices based in dehumanisation and dependency. Autistic people feel ashamed and must submit to authorities for intervention under the enlightenment model yet resist or dislike stigmatising and …