Abstract

Often hearing parents and adults belonging to the Deaf community have very different and opposite views regarding central themes in treatment and education of deaf children: cochlear implantation versus rejection of medicalization of deafness, oral communication versus Sign Language, and mainstreaming in regular schools versus education in deaf schools as the most natural learning environment for deaf children. The striking divergence of hearing and deaf people’s ethical judgments is a consequence of deafness and having normal hearing being “world-generating states,” conditions that not only lead to a different understanding and perception of the world, but also to different courses of life that make the worlds of hearing and deaf people also really different.The views of hearing and deaf people stem from different worlds and different cosmologies, within which they have their own validity. The conflict between these two views is not resolved by arbitration or the choice for a middle course, but by negotiation. The basis for this negotiation may be an ethical analysis based on a Christian personalism that tries to combine full respect for the diversity of the negotiating partners with the effort of bringing their widely divergent worlds in communication with each other