Hi! I’m Shalom.* I am a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University. My research is on wrongful discrimination, and my interests are broadly in social, political, and moral philosophy.
From 2023 to 2024, I was a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the Chair in Philosophy and Political Theory at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. I hold a Master of Social Sciences in Political Science from the National University of Singapore and a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Philosophy from Nanyang Technological University.
In my free time, I enjoy watching movies and taking photos.
*My pronouns are she/her, but I'm also fine with they/them.
Thanks to Tangyao Zhang (ANU) for taking my photo.
Research Interests
My research projects are unified by the theme of unjust inequality. I am particularly interested in how we might describe and evaluate unjust inequalities in various contexts, such as everyday choices, institutions, and inquiry.
Manuscripts Under Preparation
email for drafts
A paper on the irrelevance view of wrongful discrimination
A paper on distinctive wrongs and their role in moral inquiry
A paper on social salience
A paper on affirmative action and procedural fairness (with James Bernard Willoughby)
A paper on epistemic respect and moral encroachment (with Brandon Yip)
Doctoral Thesis
Discrimination and Irrelevance
The simple view that wrongful discrimination involves differential treatment on the basis of irrelevant factors has been scarcely defended. In my doctoral thesis, I defend this view. In the first half of my thesis, I expand on the notion of irrelevance and its relationship to wrongful discrimination. In doing so, I show how rationality bears on the matter of wrongful discrimination. In the second half of my thesis, I address the worry that a focus on rationality dilutes wrongful discrimination's putative moral content. I show that my view allows that paradigm cases of discrimination, as marked by socially salient attributes, warrant special moral concern. In addition, I argue in favour of a pluralism about the wrongs of wrongful discrimination. The upshot of this project is a conception of wrongful discrimination that accounts not just for inequalities precipitated by background injustice, but ones that are new or emerging too.