  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.
