Xiang Yu

Research

Publications

Yu, X. (2022). Hidden Desires: A Unified Strategy for Defending the Desire-Satisfaction Theory. Utilitas, 1-16.

According to the desire-satisfaction theory of well-being, your life goes well to the extent that your desires are satisfied. This theory faces the problem of prudential neutrality: it apparently cannot avoid saying that, from the point of view of prudence or self-interest, you ought to be neutral between satisfying an existing desire of yours and replacing it with an equally strong desire and satisfying the new desire. It also faces the problem of remote desires: it regards as directly relevant to your well-being even desires whose objects are intuitively too irrelevant to (or ‘remote’ from) your life to affect your welfare. In this paper, I argue that desire theorists can answer both objections by appealing to hidden desires—ones that it is psychologically realistic to attribute to the agents in the cases on which the two problems are based, even though they are not mentioned in descriptions of those cases. Once we have a more complete and realistic picture of the psychologies of the relevant agents, the problems are revealed to be far less serious than they are made out to be.

Under Review

A paper on whether, and if so, the sense in which severely depressed people have desires. 

A paper on why grief may undermine decision-making capacity.

Works in Progress

"Who Should be Responsible for Finding a Surrogate for Incarcerated Patients?" (With Pierce Randall)

Hospitals have an obligation to make reasonable efforts to find a surrogate for each patient if the patient is determined to lack decision-making capacity. However, for concerns about safety and security, hospitals that serve correctional facilities sometimes enter into agreements with those facilities that the hospital shall refrain from contacting the patient’s family or friends and that it is instead the responsibility of the correctional facility to find a surrogate for the patient. In this paper, we argue that such agreements raise two ethical challenges. First, they violate a hospital’s obligation to look for a surrogate for each patient who lacks capacity, regardless of their incarcerated status. Second, correctional facilities’ interest in doing what’s best for the facility may interfere with the obligation to find a surrogate. We propose that it should be the responsibility of hospitals rather than prisons to contact potential surrogates of an incarcerated patient.

"The Meaningfulness Standard as a Justification for Honoring Parental Requests to Treat Neurologically Damaged Pediatric Patients" (With Daniel Kim)

Families and providers typically appeal to the best interest standard (BIS) when making end-of-life decisions for a pediatric patient. In some cases, the patient has a cognitive disability that is so profound that it may be doubted whether they accrue any benefit from continued treatment. The care team typically honors parental requests to continue treatment, but this practice often induces feelings of moral distress because it is unclear how this practice serves the child’s best interest.

Some have argued that the relational potential standard (RPS) should be used as a framework to justify care requests by parents when death is near. The RPS takes a caring family-child relationship to have moral value, which gives providers a duty to serve both the patient and the family. However, this view has been shown to be ambiguous: it says either that the caring relationship contributes to the interests of the child, or that it contributes to the interests of the family. If the former, the RPS collapses into the BIS. If the latter, the RPS problematically requires that providers promote the parents’ interests at the expense of child’s interests.

In this paper, we propose the “meaningfulness standard” as an alternative to the RPS and the BIS. According to this standard, the parent-child relationship contributes to the meaning that the child’s life has. The meaning bestowed on the child by that relationship makes that child’s life meaningful in a particular way, which gives reasons for respecting parental requests to continue treatment. Unlike the RPS, this standard can explain why the parent-child relationship is valuable for a child who may not be capable of having an interest in anything. Unlike the BIS, it recognizes that a child who is incapable of ever cognizing or experiencing a caring relationship cannot have an interest in it.

"Autonomous Desires and Well-Being"

According to historical accounts of autonomous desires, a desire is autonomous only if it was formed in the right kind of way. These accounts point to the intuitive idea that whether a desire is autonomous has something to do with how it came about. For example, if you came to desire to smoke only because the wallpaper on your desktop depicts a handsome man holding a cigarette, then your desire does not seem fully autonomous. Historical accounts face the objection that they commit the genetic fallacy. In this paper, I argue that, the best version of the historical account will accept what I call the “transparency condition” as a necessary condition for a desire’s being autonomous because it allows it to answer the genetic fallacy objection. According to this condition, if the agent were aware of the explanatory reasons for her desire, then, upon reflection, she would not doubt what she takes to be normative reasons for the desire. I also argue that desire-satisfaction theorists should accept the transparency condition as a restriction on which desires are directly relevant to well-being, in the sense that their satisfaction is intrinsically good for the agents who have them. For if they accept this restriction, their theory has the virtue of being able to explain why adaptive preferences and pathological desires can be irrelevant to welfare, as value-fulfillment theories do, without sharing the problems of the latter theories. This new theory is also more plausible than other attempts to explain why adaptive preferences and pathological desires can be irrelevant to welfare.

"What Can Philosophers of Well-Being Learn from Psychologists?"

Michael Bishop [2015] proposes that the empirical literature in Positive Psychology can help philosophers decide which theory of well-being is the best: it can be used as a source of evidence that all theories of well-being ought to accommodate. In this paper, I argue against this proposal. Some psychologists investigate well-being by investigating subjective well-being. But subjective well-being is not the same thing as well-being, so we should not ask a theory of well-being to accommodate the literature in subjective well-being. Other psychologists investigate well-being by investigating eudaimonic well-being. It is not entirely clear whether eudaimonic well-being is the same thing as well-being. Either way, there is a problem for this proposal. I further argue that, even though psychological studies of well-being cannot determine what the correct theory of well-being is, they can provide ideas for philosophers on what might be intrinsically good for a person. 

Teaching

As Instructor

Health Care and Society I, II, and III (Fall 2023, Spring 2024)

Fundamentals of Clinical Ethics (Fall 2023)

Biomedical Ethics (Fall 2022)

Introduction to Ethics (Fall 2021, Spring 2022)

Introduction to Philosophy (Summer 2021)

Engineering Ethics (Fall 2020)

Introduction to Logic (Online) (Spring 2021, Spring 2020)

As Teaching Assistant

Probability and Decision Making (Spring 2019)

Death and the Meaning of Life (Fall 2018) 

Philosophy of Religion (Spring 2018)

Symbolic Logic (Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2017)

Asian Philosophies (Spring 2017)

Social and Political Philosophy (Fall 2016) 

Introduction to Philosophy (Spring 2016)

Introduction to Ethics (Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2015)