Sor Juana's insistence on intellectual inquiry applied to consumption: the ethical duty to interrogate where products come from, who profits, and what systems we sustain.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz fought her entire life for the right to ask difficult questions despite institutional pressure to remain silent. In ethical consumption, this principle becomes radical: we have not just permission but obligation to question every purchase. What are the labor conditions behind this product? Who benefits from its sale? What environmental costs are externalized? Sor Juana's tradition teaches that ignorance is not innocence—it is complicity. By refusing to accept convenient narratives from marketing and supply chains, we practice intellectual honesty in our economic choices. This concept reframes ethical consumption from burden to liberation: questioning is not deprivation but the exercise of our rational faculty in service of justice. Like Sor Juana challenging male clerics, we challenge the systems that profit from our passivity.
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