Justice as Recognition of the Other

Sor Juana's life was an act of recognition: asserting that women's minds, desires, and voices matter. She refused to be treated merely as a means to others' ends. Justice, in this tradition, begins with recognizing the other—acknowledging that another being has interests, experiences, and worth independent of our use for them. This is precisely what animals are denied in systems of exploitation. We treat them as means: means to nutrition, profit, entertainment, research data. Sor Juana's ethics of recognition demands we invert this: see the chicken not as an egg-machine but as a being with its own project of living. See the laboratory animal not as a tool but as a subject of experience. This fundamental recognition—that others matter as they are, not for what they produce—is where justice begins. It's the moral foundation from which rights and protections naturally follow.