Epistemic Injustice Against Animal Knowledge

Sor Juana fought against being dismissed as incapable of serious thought; animals face similar epistemic erasure—their suffering, preferences, and ways of knowing dismissed as irrelevant to moral philosophy. This concept names how power structures silence not just human voices but entire categories of beings. When we refuse to acknowledge what animals know about their own interests, we commit the same intellectual injustice Sor Juana experienced. Her insistence on being heard as a thinking subject becomes a model for centering animal perspectives: not imagining what they feel, but recognizing their own testimony through behavior, communication, and embodied knowledge. By learning to read animal agency on its own terms rather than through human interpretation, we correct centuries of epistemic injustice embedded in our moral systems.