The ethical dilemmas raised by infanticide, as practiced by certain ethnic groups, exemplify conflicting intercultural situations for which the teaching of pragmatic bioethics based on case analysis fails to prepare students. To establish interethnic communication, health professionals should be skilled in five lines of decision-making, three of which are substantive and two formal: a) to either reject universally unacceptable practices or to recognize them as valid in a specific local culture; b) to recognize universal values or accept cultural ethical relativism; c) to defend binding common morals within a national territory or accept the coexistence of discrepant pluralisms; d) to deliberate on infanticide as a practice comparable to induced abortion or to understand that it is based on worldviews that are not interpretable as analogous to the arguments of traditional bioethics; and e) to clarify where cultural dissidences are problems to be solved or discrepant practices to be tolerated. Intercultural dilemmas increasingly require teaching an expanded bioethics in order to train students in the development of reflexive competencies according to these lines of decision-making, in favor of respectful intercultural communication and effective pluralism.
Cultural Relativism; Interethnic Ethics; Intercultural Deliberation; Infanticide; Pluralism