TY - JOUR T1 - Competition, cooperation and human flourishing: commentary on Koch JF - Journal of Medical Ethics JO - J Med Ethics DO - 10.1136/medethics-2017-104426 SP - medethics-2017-104426 AU - Hazem Zohny Y1 - 2017/10/09 UR - http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2017/10/09/medethics-2017-104426.abstract N2 - Mainstream bioethics takes after a competitive, individualistic understanding of biology and is ultimately rooted in libertarian 19th-century values. These in turn drive much of the enthusiasm for transhumanism and explain why disability in bioethics is often characterised as a lamentable deficiency.That, at least, is the concern raised by Tom Koch in his paper Disabling disability amid competing ideologies.1 He contrasts this paradigm with a cooperative, communal understanding of biology, and in turn, of bioethics—one which entails generally prioritising a socially cooperative and accommodating response to the fact that different humans have different capacities.It is tempting to defensively nit-pick Koch’s criticisms; to conservatively argue that bioethics is fine as it is, thank you very much. That would be the wrong response, I think. His paper raises a crucial and often neglected issue, which is how the notion of human flourishing is implicitly characterised in these discussions. Nevertheless, I think there is a false dichotomy at the heart of this paper—one between the individualistic/competitive and the communal/cooperative—which overestimates the level of disagreement in bioethics.Koch argues that at least some of the elements of a Darwinian competition have been smuggled into bioethics as unquestioned suppositions that inform much of the domain’s … ER -