The structural problem is not that AI ethics lacks practitioners — it is that the practitioners being hired are positioned downstream of the decisions that matter. When ethics functions as a post-hoc audit rather than a design constraint, the salary range becomes its own argument: high enough to signal seriousness, contained enough to signal safety. The 68% of US companies lacking audit-ready AI documentation are not hiring ethicists to fix that gap — they are hiring them to manage the optics of it. The ethicist who cannot halt a deployment…