Ethics for Dummies: Ventriloquism and Responsibility

This essay aims to explore the ethical consequences of conceiving communication as a form of ventriloquism. According to this perspective, we are not the only ones speaking when we converse about the weather, give orders, apologize about something, or commit ourselves, as the very reason we feel entitled, justified or encouraged to speak comes from the various figures or dummies that compose our turns of talk. The world as we know it thus manages, literally and figuratively, to speak to and through us. As demonstrated in this essay, showing such effects of ventriloquism has important consequences in terms of ontology, but it also leads us to address key questions of ethics, that is, questions related to responsibility and the conditions of right or wrong conduct. The voices we convey are indeed also always already ours, be it only because it is through us that they make themselves heard. We are our own ventriloquists as we are our own dummies. This is the condition of our heteronomous autonomy, as it is the condition, I believe, of our ethical conduct.