A community where everyone speaks Sign? A society where familial deafness1 condemns people to sterilisation or death? A world where sign languages are suppressed? All have been historically documented: Martha's Vineyard from 17th-20th centuries; Germany in the 1930s-40s; internationally, for a century from 1880. These and other images comprise divergent social imaginaries which are the context for current and future technologies for deafness. These technologies include postnatal genetic and aural testing for deafness, and may in future include prenatal testing. Cochlear implants can enable profoundly deaf people to hear and newborn hearing screening has recently been introduced in New Zealand. Sign language is another technology whereby deaf people can communicate, create poetry and drama and tell jokes; yet its fortunes have fluctuated over time with oralism's dominance. Our article draws on two small ethnographic studies in Auckland: one with two families with hereditary deafness; the other with two families and one young adult who had recently chosen cochlear implants, to suggest that individual and societal moral reasoning on the contested issues of technologies for deafness is embedded in different social imaginaries of normalcy.

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This special issue re-envisages the anthropology of ethics from the point of view of "the negative". The negative is a gloss for actions, practices and social formations that our interlocutors view as bad, troubling, threatening, immoral or unethical, and the varied local categories and discourses through which they are evaluated. Anthropology has often overlooked immorality in its study of ethics (Yan 2011(Yan , 2014Csordas 2013; Fassin 2015; Olsen and Csordas 2019), privileging "the good" and people's practices of self-cultivation (e.g. Robbins 2013; Laidlaw 2014). 1 This elision reflects an underlying tendency within some strands of Anglophone anthropological thinking towards 1. We use the terms "ethics" and "morality" interchangeably throughout the Introduction. Some authors use "ethics" to signal a departure from Durkheimian conceptions of morality which emphasise unconscious, collective moral codes (e.g.