The principle that one's inner life—beliefs, doubts, questions, convictions—constitutes inalienable property that no authority may violate or commandeer.
Sor Juana was pressured to surrender her conscience: to stop questioning doctrine, to accept assigned interpretations, to cease her intellectual pursuits. Yet she maintained that conscience is property—it belongs to the individual, not to institutional authority. This concept aligns freedom of conscience with property rights theory, establishing that your mind, your beliefs, your questions are yours to own and direct. Libertarian justice must protect this interior property as absolutely as it protects land or goods. Forced confession, coerced belief, mandatory intellectual submission—these are property violations. They seize ownership of the one thing each person must retain to remain free: their own mind. Sor Juana's refusal to let the Church control her conscience, even as she performed obedience, asserts that this inner property is non-transferable and non-negotiable in any just society.
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