Mapping Ethics Orchestration: Reflecting on AI Practitioners' Ethics Engagement Through Ethics Pathways

Abstract

As AI practitioners play an increasingly central role in developing and deploying AI, understanding how they navigate ethical considerations in day-to-day development remains a critical challenge, especially for middle managers who broker these concerns organizationally. This paper offers a methods-oriented reflection on Ethics Pathways, a design activity for examining ethics engagement, conducted with 12 AI middle managers. Rather than reporting new empirical findings, presented separately elsewhere, we ask how the activity’s elements, path cards, affect, and narrative, shape what practitioners notice and disclose about ethics engagement. Path cards scaffold reconstruction of decision topographies; this scaffolding surfaces affective dimensions of ethics work usually invisible in organizational discourse; and practitioners convert structure and affect into narratives that translate ethical concerns across power structures. We term this layered process ethics orchestration, grounding two provocations: designing tools for affective accountability without reducing emotion to data, and shifting reflection from individuals toward organizational narrative infrastructures.