Xiang Yu

Welcome! I am an assistant professor and clinical ethicist at the Institute for Bioethics & Health Humanities at University of Texas Medical Branch.  Previously, I was a clinical ethics fellow at the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College. 

I completed my PhD in Philosophy at The Ohio State University in 2022, and my MA in Philosophy at Texas Tech University in 2016. 

My research focuses on well-being (especially issues relating to desires), medical decision making, and health policies for vulnerable populations. 

My CV is here. My email address is xiayu@utmb.edu.

Research

Publications

Yu, X., Nelson, R. H., & Schuman, O. (Forthcoming). Grief and Decision-Making Capacity. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. 

Yu, X. (2025). Well-Being, Depression, and Desire. Journal of Value Inquiry.

Yu, X., & Kim, D. T. (2025). Impermissibility of Euthanasia and Self-Regarding Duties to Stay Alive. Journal of Medical Ethics, 51:243-244. 

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

Under Review

A paper on the ethics of continuing treating pediatric patients with severe neurologic impairments.

A paper on surrogate decision making for incarcerated patients.

Works in Progress

"The 39-Week Rule: Toward a Pregnant Person - Centric View of Induction of Labor" (With Hannah Carpenter)

According to the “39-week rule”, established by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), an induction of labor before 39 weeks of gestation is not recommended unless the pregnant person’s or fetus’s health is at risk. The justification for this rule is to reduce rates of adverse childbirth outcomes. Some have argued against this rule by pointing out that it leads to an increase in term stillbirth and adverse pregnancy outcomes. We offer a new argument against the 39-week rule by appealing to ACOG’s policy on abortion and proposing a patient-centered framework for labor induction. This approach seeks to reconcile ACOG's conflicting policies and empower pregnant persons in their birthing experiences.

First, we observe that the 39-week rule is in tension with ACOG’s policy on abortion, which seems to allow pregnant people to seek abortion at any point during pregnancy. While ACOG’s abortion policy prioritizes the autonomy and the well-being of pregnant persons, the 39-week induction rule neglects these factors and instead prioritizes fetal well-being in a manner inconsistent with ACOG's broader ethical framework. Second, we argue that ACOG should revise its policy on early induction of labor to accommodate the autonomy and the well-being of the pregnant person while protecting fetal well-being. More specifically, early induction should be allowed if 1) it respects patient autonomy, and 2) it would improve the patient’s well-being without sacrificing fetal well-being. This shift would align ACOG's policies with a more coherent and patient-centered approach to obstetric care.

"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.