Xiang Yu
Welcome! I am a clinical ethics fellow at the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College.
Previously, I was a senior analyst intern at Health Advances, a strategy consulting firm that focuses on the healthcare industry, and an adjunct professor for Biomedical Ethics at Muskingum University.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy at The Ohio State University in 2022, and my MA in Philosophy at Texas Tech University in 2016. I work primarily on bioethics and well-being.
My research focuses on well-being (especially issues relating to desires), psychiatric disorders, and medical decision-making capacity. Projects I'm currently developing include topics on why grief may be capacity-undermining, whether depression deprives one of desires, and why pathological desires such as an anorexic patient’s desire not to eat are irrelevant to a person’s well-being.
My CV is here. My email address is otssai@gmail.com.
Research
Publications
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.
(Abstract redacted.)
Works in Progress
"Grief and Decision-Making Capacity" (With Ryan Nelson and Olivia Schuman)
Decision-making capacity is an important concept in clinical ethics. If a patient has this capacity, then they are allowed to make decisions to consent to or refuse treatment for themselves. While it is recognized in the literature that a patient who is in the throes of grief may lack sufficient capacity, at least temporarily, what has not been discussed is why grief may be capacity undermining. In this paper, we seek to answer this question. We argue that accounts that appeal to the absence of appreciation, the lack of ability to make a rational decision, or pathological values are unsuccessful. We argue instead for a value-based account that says grief may deprive a patient of capacity because the patient’s decision may fail to fulfill any of their values. On this account, a grieving patient who refuses treatment may have a mere desire to forgo treatment, but they may not stably identify with this desire and therefore may not value forgoing treatment. Accepting this account has two implications. First, in addition to the four conditions that have been widely accepted to be conditions for capacity (i.e., a choice, appreciation, understanding, and reasoning), value fulfillment may be considered as another necessary condition for capacity. Second, we need a new capacity assessment tool that captures a patient’s values and preferences over time.
"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.
"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.
"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)