Institutional Critique and Structural Change

Sor Juana did not merely live virtuously within her constraints; she questioned the systems that imposed those constraints. She critiqued institutional power directly. Applied to animal ethics, this means recognizing that individual compassion is insufficient while systems of exploitation persist. A person may refuse to eat factory-farmed meat, but industrial agriculture continues unchanged. Individual virtue cannot substitute for institutional reform. Sor Juana's intellectual legacy involves systematic critique—examining how power operates, whose interests institutions serve, what would need to change fundamentally. For animals, this means addressing the laws that classify them as property, the economic incentives that commodify them, the research paradigms that treat them as experimental subjects. True animal rights require structural transformation: legal personhood frameworks, agricultural revolution, industrial reform. Sor Juana would likely insist that authentic moral concern manifests as sustained critique and action toward institutional change, not as individual purity. Justice is not a personal achievement but a collective reconstruction of systems.