The Veil of Ignorance and Intellectual Humility

Sor Juana's fearless interrogation of established knowledge systems parallels Rawls's thought experiment: both demand that we bracket our advantages to imagine fair rules. Sor Juana refused to accept that women lacked intellectual capacity simply because patriarchal authority declared it so. In Rawlsian terms, she forced her society behind the veil of ignorance—asking them to design justice without knowing whether they would be born male or female, noble or servant. Her tradition teaches that intellectual humility is not passivity but active resistance to inherited inequalities. For modern practitioners, this means deliberately examining which privileges shape our reasoning, and whether our theories of justice would survive if we didn't know our place within them. Sor Juana's letters and defenses model how to challenge systemic bias through rigorous, compassionate argument.