Dr. Kiran Bhardwaj is an Instructor and Chair of the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department as well as a House Counselor in Double Brick House. In addition to teaching an Independent Project course for seniors, Bhardwaj also teaches Introduction to Ethics, Feminist Philosophies, and Ethics of Blame and Forgiveness. She has also completed several individual works, most recently “Giving up on someone” in The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy and “The Kingdom of Ends as Ideal” in Human Dignity and the Kingdom of Ends. Bhardwaj is also a classically trained oboist.
As Department Chair of Philosophy and Religious Studies, how do you balance leadership with teaching and scholarship?
All of them nestle together really nicely. My department is really invested in thinking about how we can give students really wonderful experiences and pathways to show them that philosophy and religious studies can be for every student on campus. Talking and thinking about how to do our work as teachers is of central importance. Leadership is obviously a different thing, but because I value my colleagues so much, it makes it really easy to work together. I am continuing as a scholar, but scholarship is something that I do just for joy. There’s no expectation for faculty at Phillips Academy to do things along those lines. It comes, again, nicely in conversation with teaching. For example, many of my students are reading through texts that I find really useful to think about for my own research projects because they’re squarely in the intersection of what I think is really interesting and what I think the Andover students find really interesting.
Do you have a childhood memory that has shaped you?
One thing I do appreciate about my childhood is that my family moved around a lot, and at the time I hated it. I am a flaming introvert and moving from place to place was always really, really tricky for me. Especially since I was super shy as well. One of the things that I really value about it as an adult is the flexibility to step into new situations and to be able to find my feet and to have learned the skills of chatting with people whose experiences have been quite different from mine. That’s something about my childhood experiences that have really shaped me.
What do you think is a common misconception about philosophy or philosophy as an occupation?
There’s so many misconceptions about philosophy that I think are worth combating. One of which is that you have to be a genius or that you have to do it alone or that it has to be adversarial. A lot of people might have this image in their heads of people going at it and trying to outsmart the other and the smartest person wins. I think that’s a really harmful perception of philosophy. It actually ought to be aimed towards working to repair your own and others’ arguments. It can be deeply collaborative. We do our best work in progress rather than doing it all right on the first draft. Those are some of the things that I think are really important about understanding philosophy at its best.
What is the best piece of advice you have ever received?
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve received, and this is something that is really applicable to the Andover student body too, is being willing to show things when they are imperfect, in process, and messy, and where you need others’ help to workshop them [to] make them better. I think being able to show off things as they are in progress is a really important skill set. Learning to be comfortable to do that is a really important life skill.
Since you’re a classically trained musician, what role does music play in your life?
I feel like it’s really important to have third spaces. Places that aren’t school, places that aren’t home, but third spaces. For me, orchestra is one of those places. I play in a few different local orchestras. I play the oboe. I just find it’s always this place for respite and for creating something together with other people who I otherwise would never have come into contact with. I also found my husband in orchestra, which is also a really good fact.
One of your recent publications, Giving Up On Someone, is about when and whether we should disengage from people who act wrongly. Why do you consider this such an important moral question?
We often take it to be a matter of discretion about whether or not we give up on somebody. We just say, ‘Oh, I don’t like that person, I don’t enjoy being around them, I’m going to give up on having a relationship with them.’ I actually don’t think that it’s a matter of discretion. I think there are moral criteria that matter, partially because we ought to be aiming towards moral solidarity with other humans and towards various kinds of ways of looking out for other people. I actually recommend fewer instances of giving up on people. My book is actually primarily addressed to people who are dealing with more petty or small scale harms, not large scale harms. In those kinds of cases, folks have good reason to give up on their wrongdoers. The interesting thing is when you see a bad interaction between two people and you think that one person is in the wrong, sometimes as a matter of solidarity, we give up on them and we alienate them or we try to never interact with them. I actually don’t know if that’s a way of being in good solidarity with the person who is wronged by them. I think instead we can often protect folks from bad behavior better if we continue to engage with people who are acting wrongfully.
What is a philosophical idea or principle that you strongly believe in or support?
One of the moral principles that I personally subscribe to is the importance of having respect for people as people. Seeing them as choice-makers, as the people who they are, and everything that is involved in respecting humans as humans.
You developed an ethics pedagogy for computer science and other technical classes. Why do you think ethics should be integrated into learning about technology?
That is a project that I have worked on with Dr. Zufelt from computer science, and I’ve worked with other computer science teachers. Full credit to them for being such amazing collaborators on that. The thought we had is if we want people who are creating technology to be able to do so well and effectively, thinking about ethics has to be part and partial of what you’re doing all of the time as computer science students. It can’t just be sort of like ‘Okay, now it’s the moment to think about ethics and then we go back to the real stuff, which is computer science.’ It should be constantly a part and partial of what we do. One of the things that I really appreciate about my colleagues in computer science is they figured out ways in which ethics is already naturally in conversation with the technical skills or able to be in conversation with the technical skills that students are learning anyway. They design projects that make sure it’s always part of the story.
Can you talk about your interest in philosophical feminism?
One of the things that theories like philosophical feminism do for us is it helps us think about the ways in which our world is structured that can constrain or enable people based upon their identities. Of course, based upon their gender is one common concern for feminism. I actually think that there are resources, like conceptual resources, from feminist traditions and other similar traditions that can allow us to think about race or disability really effectively or really any other experience that can either constrain or enable people. Thinking about how to respond to structural injustice is something that I want in everybody’s back pocket.
If there was one book you could recommend to someone who doesn’t know anything about philosophy, what would it be and why?
I really like “Life is Hard” by Kieran Setiya. He’s a philosopher, a really interesting one. He’s talking about how philosophy can help us deal with the difficulties that we have in life. He has chronic pain and he talks about his experience. There are a number of different chapters on things that make life hard, like loneliness and things along those lines. That’s a really helpful touchdown.
