Justice as Correction of Systematic Blindness

Sor Juana's era required her contemporaries to see what their education had trained them not to see: women as intellectually capable, spiritually significant, deserving of respect. The blindness wasn't inevitable; it was systematically maintained through education, law, and tradition. Similarly, contemporary society maintains structured invisibility around animal suffering and consciousness. We design systems that hide slaughter, confine sentient beings out of sight, and normalize violence through euphemistic language. Justice, in Sor Juana's framework, requires correcting this systematic perceptual failure. It demands we look directly at what industries hide: the specific suffering of individual animals, their distinct personalities and preferences, their desperate fear and pain. This isn't just emotional manipulation; it's epistemic justice—giving proper weight to experiences we've been culturally trained to dismiss or minimize. Sor Juana's intellectual tradition insists that real justice requires seeing clearly, which means confronting uncomfortable truths and abandoning the comfortable fictions that permit exploitation.