Consent Over Obedience in Authority Relations

Sor Juana's refusal to surrender her intellectual autonomy to ecclesiastical authority—despite professing religious faith—illustrates the distinction between consent-based and obedience-based authority. She challenged the Archbishop's demand that she abandon her secular studies, asserting instead that genuine virtue requires the freedom to pursue truth. In libertarian justice, property and freedom depend on replacing obedience structures with consent frameworks. Authority is only legitimate when those subject to it have genuinely agreed to its terms and retain the right to withdraw. Sor Juana's life demonstrates the psychological cost of obedience-based systems: forced silence, creative suppression, and intellectual starvation. By contrast, consent-based relationships—whether to institutions, persons, or ideas—preserve individual dignity and the freedom necessary to develop, own, and defend one's intellectual and material property without fear of punishment.