Dr. Bhardwaj has taught philosophy at Phillips Academy, Andover since 2017, and is the Department Chair of the Philosophy and Religious Studies department. She teaches courses including Introduction to Ethics, Views of Human Nature, Responses to Atrocity, Ethics of Technology, and The Ethics of Blame and Forgiveness. She was awarded a Tang Fellowship for 2019-2024, in which she and her collaborators have developed an ethics pedagogy for computer science and other technical classes and run ongoing programming.

Her philosophical interests are in ethics (especially moral psychology), practical ethics, Kant, and feminism.

Her book, Giving Up on Someone (Bloomsbury, October 2026) is focused on a central question for many of us:

When is it morally permissible to give up on people who are badly behaved or annoying to ourselves or others?

We have all had frustrating encounters with such people, and many conclude that whether to preserve our relationships with them is a matter of personal discretion-justified solely by virtue of one’s own preferences and choices. This book, by contrast, argues that giving up on people is instead better evaluated by whether that choice meets certain moral criteria.

Since those who have suffered grave harms straightforwardly meet such criteria, this book is not written about such cases. The focus for this book is the question as asked by those who experience milder, or milder-by-comparison, kinds of harm or discomfort in the face of wrongdoing, particularly: (a) those who are only indirectly harmed, (b) those who are primary victims of wrongdoing that is relatively minor: such as petty slights or annoying bad behaviors, and (c) those for whom the story of wronging or harm is more complex, as when multiple parties have mutually wronged or harmed each other. If these folks take the principles of due care this book offers seriously, we will be less likely to give up on others than we currently do.

After all, when we give up on someone they go “away” in a limited sense: perhaps outside our scope of attention, but they are still somewhere. We may not be able to protect those who are most vulnerable to a person’s continued bad behavior-nor do right by the person themselves-when we give up on the person we dislike. This book offers arguments based on principles of moral solidarity and community repair for navigating our unpleasant interactions with others.

Her other most recent publications are “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, edited by Jan-Willem van der Rijt and Adam Cureton (Routledge 2021).

She completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy as a Royster Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.