This article is about the distinction between justification and excuse, a distinction which, while familiar, remains controversial. My discussion focuses on three questions. First, what is the distinction? Second, why is it important? And third, what are some areas of inquiry in which the distinction might be philosophically fruitful? I suggest that the distinction has practical and theoretical consequences, and is therefore worth taking seriously; I highlight two philosophical issues in which the distinction might play a useful role; but I express skepticism about the prospects for drawing a firm distinction between justification and excuse.

Most Western jurisdictions require parental licensing in the case of adoption but not in the case of assisted or unassisted biological reproduction. In an earlier paper, we set out to show that no arguments in favour of such a system of parental licensing succeed. One argument that we failed to consider, however, is one that appeals to the notion of a right to reproduce. According to this argument, prospective biological parents are protected from parental licensing because they exercise a right to reproduce when attempting to have children, while the same cannot be said about prospective adoptive parents. This paper shows that such an argument is flawed. It also questions whether people have a right to reproduce, and distinguishes this right from other, legitimate, rights, such a right to become a parent and a right to bodily autonomy.

In the past, the Hague Conference on Private International Law has shaped how people can become the legal parents of children born in countries other than their own. It did so by creating the 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. It is now interested in developing a convention on international contract pregnancy (or what many call “surrogacy”). We discuss in this commentary what such a convention would have to include for it to be ethically consistent with the Convention on Adoption.

Abstract:We revisit a debate initiated some 15 years ago by Ray Elugardo and Robert Stainton about the domain of arguments. Our main result is that arguments are not exclusively sets of linguistic expressions. Instead, as we put it, some non-linguistic items have 'logical form'. The crucial examples are arguments, both deductive and inductive, made with unembedded words and phrases.

Byrne & Hilbert (B&H) argue that colors are reflectance properties of objects. They also claim that a necessary condition for something's being a color is that it causally explain – or be causally implicated in the explanation of – our perceptions of color. I argue that these two positions are in conflict.