A plethora of toolkits, checklists, and workshops have been developed to bridge the well-documented gap between AI ethics principles and practice. Yet little is known about effects of such interventions on practitioners. We conducted an ethnographic investigation in a major European city organization that developed and works to integrate an ethics toolkit into city operations. We find that the integration of ethics tools by technical teams desta-bilises their boundaries, roles, and mandates around responsibilities and decisions. This lead to emotional discomfort and feelings of vulnerability, which neither toolkit designers nor the organization had accounted for.We leverage the concept of moral stress to argue that this affective experience is a core challenge to the successful integration of ethics tools in technical practice. Even in this best case scenario, organisational structures were not able to deal with moral stress that resulted from attempts to implement responsible technology development practices.

Ethics toolkits, checklists and workshops are intended to help integrate ethical considerations into the design of data-driven systems. Yet little is known about what long-term effect such integrations might have. We conducted an ethnographic investigation of the adoption of an internal ethical toolkit in a major European city organization. We find that neither toolkit designers nor organizations that implement these, pay attention to the affective experience and emotional costs of integrating ethics toolkits into technology design team workflows. We demonstrate how moral awareness, while necessary for moral technical practice, also leads to unaccounted moral stress for practitioners.