With experience over time.
I think what I’m getting from this conversation is part of what’s being expressed here is a lack of awareness of social danger (don’t take that as a value judgement, just a statement). The way this looks to the rest of us is “how would I know which predator will attack me and which will not?” - and for the most part, the answer is: you don’t, so act accordingly.
You're confusing "being aware of" and "caring about".
Autistic people are acutely aware of "social danger". It's something we deal with every moment of every day since we're old enough to realize we're different. For most, it's a deeply traumatic experience to deal with as a child. And by most, I mean nearly 100%. Common wisdom is that there are no un-traumatized autistic individuals.
> for the most part, the answer is: you don’t, so act accordingly
This tells me you fundamentally do not understand autism. "Act accordingly" is one of the defenses we have to learn. And we learn it totally alone. What behavior is and is not appropriate is one big stochastic experiment that lasts your entire life. We learn to observe people around us, but that's not enough. It's easy to mimic behavior, but we don't get the context or reasoning behind it until we get it wrong.
Knowing how to act accordingly is the core problem in most autistic people's lives. It's incredibly challenging and very dangerous. We have a lifetime of trauma built up around this problem, which makes it extremely stressful to be in a situation where you don't know what to do.
How about the gate agent at the airport, who boards and deboards people from the plane?
I don't necessarily love listening to that person, but I accept that we probably need somebody doing that job so that we can hopefully get the plane boarded and deboarded in some sort of nonchaotic way.
The thought of whether or not this person is "better" than me seems rather bizarre. They probably know how to board a plane better than me, and even if they don't, it's generally still going to be better than 200 arriving and departing passengers devolving into a free-for-all because they have 200 competing opinions of how things should work.
Generally, most sorts of "authority" I experience on a daily basis fall into this sort of mental bin for me.
Obviously that's a rather trivial example.
What's the logical endpoint of "nobody is better than me" or "nobody is better than anybody?" Just like, no rules whatsoever for anybody, unless you explicitly opt-in to some specific rule or authority figure you happen to like?
And how does this even relate to autism and/or one's (lack of) empathy?
You seem to be arguing that autistic people also reject the idea that some people have authority because they are better than you in some context. This isn't the case.
At the airport, the staff has authority because they are following a higher ethical directive to protect everyone. The pilot has authority because they're responsible for dozens or hundreds of lives. The pilot is more important than you, they are a better person in this context, and thus have authority.
As a counterpoint, America is having a crisis about the authority of the police. People are rejecting the authority of the police because they assume authority makes them better, and therefore entitles them to whatever they want. Whereas police who do follow the directive to protect everyone tend to be respected and have authority because of that.
I think that most neurotypical people also reject the idea that authority makes you better. But they tend to play along with it, for some reason. The discussion here is about the autistic people who don't play along and just flatly reject the idea.
To answer your question, these types of autistic people tend to have a very strong idea of right and wrong and a rich code of ethics. Something wrong shouldn't be tolerated and should be set right. But I think most people in general feel that way.
Where autism comes into play is that an autistic person's notion of what is intolerable is often quite different. An autistic person is also more likely to lack or not care about the social inhibition against challenging or rejecting something that they feel is wrong.