# Moral Dilemmas for Moral Machines

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.06152 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06152/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 110 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07316/) (2016)
- [AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15366/) (2021)
- [PMLB: A Large Benchmark Suite for Machine Learning Evaluation and Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00512/) (2017)
- [Artificial Intelligence: the global landscape of ethics guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11668/) (2019)
- [Scruples: A Corpus of Community Ethical Judgments on 32,000 Real-Life Anecdotes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09094/) (2020)
- [Imitating Driver Behavior with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06699/) (2017)
- [A Voting-Based System for Ethical Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06692/) (2017)
- [The social dilemma of autonomous vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03346/) (2015)
- [A Computational Model of Commonsense Moral Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04346/) (2018)
- [Landscape of Machine Implemented Ethics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00335/) (2020)
- [Algorithmic decision-making in AVs: Understanding ethical and technical concerns for smart cities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13122/) (2019)
- [The Tragedy of the AI Commons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05203/) (2020)
- [Est-ce que vous compute? Code-switching, cultural identity, and AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08256/) (2021)
- [Towards a Framework Combining Machine Ethics and Machine Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00590/) (2019)
- [Feature Analysis and Selection for Training an End-to-End Autonomous Vehicle Controller Using the Deep Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09744/) (2017)
- [On the Morality of Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11945/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Metaethical Perspectives on 'Benchmarking' AI Ethics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05151/) (2022)
- [Large-scale moral machine experiment on large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06790/) (2024)
- [Exploring Persona-dependent LLM Alignment for the Moral Machine Experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10886/) (2025)
- [The Linguistic Blind Spot of Value-Aligned Agency, Natural and Artificial](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00868/) (2022)
- [Normative Common Ground Replication (NormCoRe): Replication-by-Translation for Studying Norms in Multi-Agent AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11974/) (2026)
- [Strategic Polysemy in AI Discourse: A Philosophical Analysis of Language, Hype, and Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21043/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous systems are being developed and deployed in situations that may require some degree of ethical decision-making ability. As a result, research in machine ethics has proliferated in recent years. This work has included using moral dilemmas as validation mechanisms for implementing decision-making algorithms in ethically-loaded situations. Using trolley-style problems in the context of autonomous vehicles as a case study, I argue (1) that this is a misapplication of philosophical thought experiments because (2) it fails to appreciate the purpose of moral dilemmas, and (3) this has potentially catastrophic consequences; however, (4) there are uses of moral dilemmas in machine ethics that are appropriate and the novel situations that arise in a machine-learning context can shed some light on philosophical work in ethics.