  Moral dilemmas play an important role in theorizing both about ethical norms
and moral psychology. Yet thought experiments borrowed from the philosophical
literature often lack the nuances and complexity of real life. We leverage
100,000 threads -- the largest collection to date -- from Reddit's
r/AmItheAsshole to examine the features of everyday moral dilemmas. Combining
topic modeling with evaluation from both expert and crowd-sourced workers, we
discover 47 finer-grained, meaningful topics and group them into five
meta-categories. We show that most dilemmas combine at least two topics, such
as family and money. We also observe that the pattern of topic co-occurrence
carries interesting information about the structure of everyday moral concerns:
for example, the generation of moral dilemmas from nominally neutral topics,
and interaction effects in which final verdicts do not line up with the moral
concerns in the original stories in any simple way. Our analysis demonstrates
the utility of a fine-grained data-driven approach to online moral dilemmas,
and provides a valuable resource for researchers aiming to explore the
intersection of practical and theoretical ethics.
