Moral Imagination and Empathetic Perspective-Taking

Sor Juana's intellectual project demanded imaginative leaps—understanding perspectives different from her own, inhabiting positions of others through thought. Her poetry and theological writings demonstrate a remarkable capacity for perspective-taking that overcame institutional constraints. Moral consideration of animals requires similar imaginative work: the deliberate cultivation of empathy for beings whose experiences differ radically from ours. We cannot directly experience what it is to be a bat navigating by echolocation or a whale navigating ocean currents, yet imagination allows us to recognize their experiences as real and morally significant even in their difference. This concept valorizes art, literature, narrative, and creative expression as moral tools. Stories about animals, imaginative reconstruction of their inner lives, and artistic practices that honor animal subjectivity become essential infrastructure for justice. Sor Juana herself used imaginative writing to expand moral boundaries. Contemporary animal advocacy similarly relies on expanding imagination—moving beyond sympathy (which distances) to genuine empathetic understanding. This requires intellectual discipline and emotional openness: the work of thinking ourselves into unfamiliar consciousness to recognize the moral claims beings make simply by existing.