Lesson · 4 min Stretch
The Blame You Built
In one line Do not blame people for limits you imposed.
Sor Juana turned the complaint around. People blamed women for the very limits that had been required of them. Do not fault someone for the role you built and then demanded.
The complaint and the condition are one argument. If you closed the training and then cite the missing training, you are citing your own work. The ignorance is not a finding. It is the policy, arriving as if it were a fact about the person.
Ask who made the limit. A real gap can still be named. What cannot be done is to impose the gap, punish the person for having it, and call that a discovery.
Untrained, and then unfit
A workshop refuses to teach a worker the machine, then rejects her application because she does not know the machine. The rejection quotes the refusal.
Sor Juana would not let those stand as two facts. The second sentence is the first one in a new coat.
Try this today Before you fault someone for a gap, ask whether the gap was built for them.
Cite or share this lesson
A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “The Blame You Built.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/lesson/blame-you-built. Accessed 13 November 2026.
Sources
- Wikipedia, “Sor Juana” — Biography, including her poem on blame.
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (1691) — She answers the charge against women’s learning by pointing at the conditions that produced the complaint.
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Hombres necios — The redondillas against blaming someone for the role you required of them. The Spanish text is public domain.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Moral Responsibility” — When a person is responsible for harms they helped to cause.