Moral Missions: Sustaining Responsible Practice by Surfacing Practitioner Moral Decision-Making Procedures

Abstract

A growing ecosystem of techniques, toolkits, and guidelines has been developed to help data scientists consider the social implications of data-driven technologies. However, prior literature highlights that even when this ecosystem of techniques is provided to professional data scientists, they still struggle to consistently adopt a responsible data science practice. We posit that the key to sustained responsible data science practice is to approach it as a "moral mission": a conviction-driven technical practice that seeks to transform social conditions by any degree possible. In this paper, we present a semi-structured interview study with 15 responsible data scientists and AI practitioners to understand the moral decision-making procedures they use to articulate and actualize their moral missions. Through a phenomenological analysis of our participants' accounts, we find participants engage in embodied introspection, circumvent institutional expectations, and center relationality throughout their moral missions. We also present how our participants engage in similar processes to contend with generative AI (GenAI) in their responsible practice. We conclude by calling for subversive data science communities and identifying sociotechnical design implications to better support sustainable responsible data science practice.