Andrew Botterell

This paper is about the remedy of disgorgement for breach of contract. In it I argue for two conclusions. I first argue that, prima facie at least, disgorgement damages for breach of contract present something of a puzzle. But second, I argue that if we pay close attention to the notion of contractual performance, this puzzle can be resolved in a way that is consistent with principles of corrective justice. In particular, I suggest that even if a contract gives the promisee a right to only the promisor's performance of the contract, such a right can sometimes entail the acquisition by the promisee of certain rights of ownership. And in situations in which such rights are acquired, the disappointed promisee is entitled to the gains realized by the promisor in breach of contract by reason of the fact that such gains are something to which the promisee has an antecedent right.

My goal in this paper is to argue that the principled approach to hearsay is consistent with the rule of law. I begin by contrasting an instrumental conception of the rule of law with a conception that views the rule of law in primarily normative terms. I then turn my attention to a recent criticism of the Supreme Court of Canada’s principled approach to hearsay and suggest that if Michael Oakeshott’s normative interpretation of the rule of law is adopted, there is no tension between the principled approach to hearsay and the rule of law.

The status quo on parental licensing in most Western jurisdictions is that licensing is required in the case of adoption but not in the case of assisted or unassisted biological reproduction. To have a child via adoption, one must fulfill licensing requirements, which, beyond the usual home study, can include mandatory participation in parenting classes. One is exempt from these requirements, however, if one has a child via biological reproduction, including assisted reproduction involving donor gametes or a contract pregnancy. In an earlier paper, we challenged this system of parental licensing by showing that arguments in favour of it do not succeed. One argument we failed to consider, however, is that prospective biological parents have a right to reproduce that protects them against the sort of state interference that is involved in parental licensing. According to this argument, because prospective adoptive parents do not exercise a similar right when attempting to become parents, they are not similarly protected. In this paper, we argue that this reproductive rights argument, like other arguments in favour of the status quo on parental licensing, is flawed. We also question whether people in fact have a right to reproduce, and in doing so distinguish this right from others that we think are legitimate, including a right to become a parent and a right to bodily autonomy.

Many contemporary philosophers of mind are concerned to defend a thesis called a posteriori physicalism. This thesis has two parts, one metaphysical, and the other epistemological. The metaphysical part of the thesis—the physicalist part—is the claim that the psychological nature of the actual world is wholly physical. The epistemological part of the thesis—the a posteriori part—is the claim that no a priori connection holds between psychological nature and physical nature. Despite its attractiveness, however, a familiar argument alleges that a posteriori physicalism cannot be true. This argument is sometimes called the Property Dualism Argument Against Physicalism. In this paper, I consider Stephen White’s version of the Property Dualism Argument and argue that it fails. I distinguish two ways in which the argument’s crucial notion might be understood, and I argue that on neither way of understanding it is the Property Dualism Argument compelling.

DH Mellor has argued that there can be no negative, disjunctive, or conjunctive properties. This argument has been criticized by Alex Oliver on the grounds that it rests on a contentious identity criterion for facts, but it seems to me that a simpler criticism is available. According to this criticism, the problem with Mellor's argument is that it trades on an ambiguity in the semantics of the phrase "the fact that", according to which "the fact that" can be understood as creating either an intensional or an extensional context.