Epistemic Injustice and Animal Voicelessness

Sor Juana wrote within systems that delegitimized women's knowledge and authority. This concept applies similar analysis to animals: they are systematically excluded from the epistemic frameworks that determine what counts as morally relevant. Animals cannot testify to their own suffering in human language; their experiences are filtered through human interpretation or ignored entirely. This epistemic injustice—the wrongful exclusion of a group's perspective from knowledge production—parallels the intellectual silencing Sor Juana resisted. We must develop frameworks for recognizing animal testimony through behavior, physiology, and ethological understanding. By acknowledging epistemic injustice against animals, we expand moral epistemology itself. Sor Juana's insistence that women's voices must be heard in intellectual life demands we similarly insist on accounting for animal experience within ethical reasoning, not as victims described by others but as beings whose reality must inform our moral knowledge.