Epistemic Trust as a Mechanism for Ethics Integration: Failure Modes and Design Principles from 70 Moral Imagination Workshops

TL;DR

This paper introduces epistemic trust as a key factor in successful ethics interventions within engineering teams, identifying failure modes and proposing design principles to enhance engagement.

Contribution

It develops a novel conceptual model of epistemic trust, identifies failure modes, and offers design principles based on qualitative analysis of 70 moral imagination workshops.

Findings

Identified five key dimensions of epistemic trust: Relevance, Inclusivity, Agency, Authority, and Alignment.

Created a typology of 23 failure modes related to ethics intervention engagement.

Proposed nine design principles to cultivate epistemic trust in practice.

Abstract

Bottom-up responsible innovation initiatives seek to empower technology development teams to engage in ethical reflection, yet such interventions frequently fail to achieve practitioner engagement. Why do some ethics interventions succeed while others are dismissed as irrelevant, adversarial, or disconnected from work? This paper proposes epistemic trust -- the degree to which practitioners regard an intervention, its facilitators, and its content as credible, relevant, and actionable -- as a conceptual model linking intervention design to engagement outcomes. Drawing on philosophical work on testimony and on practice-based qualitative analysis of over 70 moral imagination workshops with engineering teams between 2019 and 2025, we identify five dimensions of epistemic trust salient to ethics interventions (Relevance, Inclusivity, Agency, Authority, and Alignment) and present a typology of 23 failure modes that arise when these dimensions are inadequately addressed. We derive nine design principles for cultivating epistemic trust, grounded in our operationalisation of moral imagination through technomoral scenarios and structured deliberation. Our findings contribute to the literature on collaborative socio-technical integration by specifying conditions of uptake that existing frameworks leave undertheorised. We acknowledge limitations including selection effects from voluntary participation and the absence of formal outcome measures, and position our failure mode typology as practitioner hypotheses warranting further empirical validation.