Editor’s Choice: the Best Articles of 2020

“As is tradition at Merion West, here are our editor’s choices for his favorite Merion West articles of this past year.”

Although choosing favorites, making lists, and ranking things in general may be on the wane, at Merion West, we do have this tradition each December of offering to our readers a few favorite articles from the past year. At the very least, a list such as this may jog one’s memory or gently nudge him to return for a second look to a few pieces that are particularly worthwhile. Many of the pieces chosen also speak to some of the most fundamental events and questions of this past year, a year that—beyond any doubt—has been one of the more hectic and difficult in recent memory. I will also note that for the purpose of this exercise, articles from our burgeoning “Why America?” series have been excluded from consideration.

5. “The Irrationality of Rationalism” by Henry George

As someone living with Epidermolysis bullosa, the condition bioethicist Peter Singer cites as one whose presence may justify euthanasia, Henry George discusses how various ethical theories purportedly grounded in rationalism can find themselves suggesting courses of action few would find, in practice, ethical. Seeming to agree with the quip that it is often “ethicists” who turn out to be the least ethical people around, George posits that an overreliance on certain academically popular modes of thinking can lead a society to dangerous places, where respecting human life can become a casualty of introducing novel moral theories. In making his argument, he invokes thinkers such as Leon Kass and Yoram Hazony, while also concluding that despite his diagnosis with a condition as challenging as Epidermolysis bullosa, his life is still very much worth living.

4. “The Coronavirus: On Risk and Idiots” by Allen Farrington

In a piece that now looks extraordinarily prescient, Allen Farrington takes issue with opinion leaders—particularly, Cass Sunstein—who, in Farrington’s view, were far too dismissive of the possibility that the then-nascent Coronavirus could become a problem of extraordinary magnitude. Urging in early March for people to begin to prepare for the possibility that a virus that then had only infected 83 Americans might spread widely, Farrington takes issue with the cocky certainty displayed by many in the commentator class. Also implicit in Farrington’s piece, particularly reading it now more than nine months later, is how it hints at a question that has long dogged the world of journalism: Ought there be a reputational penalty for being very wrong in one’s predictions or prescriptions?

3. “Where Social Justice Activists Persuade Me—and Where They Don’t” by David Ferrero