Conscience as Inviolable Property

Sor Juana's refusal to suppress her intellectual convictions or abandon her theological questions, despite pressure from religious authorities, treats conscience as a domain of absolute ownership. In libertarian terms, conscience represents the most intimate property—one's own thoughts and principles. Coercion of belief violates the foundational libertarian prohibition on aggression because it invades the sanctum of the person. No authority—religious, political, or social—has a rightful claim on what an individual must believe internally. Sor Juana's resilience under institutional interrogation illustrates the cost of denying conscience as property: spiritual imprisonment, self-betrayal, and systematic diminishment. Applied to libertarian justice, this concept establishes that forced confession, mandatory ideological conformity, and censorship of conscience are forms of theft—stealing from individuals their most essential possession: their authentic inner lives and moral agency.