The Third Moment of AI Ethics: Developing Relatable and Contextualized Tools

Artificial intelligence (AI) ethics has gained significant momentum, evidenced by the growing body of published literature, policy guidelines, and public discourse. However, the practical implementation and adoption of AI ethics principles among practitioners has not kept pace with this theoretical development. Common barriers to adoption include overly abstract language, poor accessibility, and insufficient practical guidance for implementation. Through participatory design with industry practitioners, we developed an open-source tool that bridges this gap. Our tool is firmly grounded in normative ethical frameworks while offering concrete, actionable guidance in an intuitive format that aligns with established software development workflows. We validated this approach through a proof of concept study in the United States autonomous driving industry.