  Ethics is one of the longest standing intellectual endeavors of humanity. In
recent years, the fields of AI and NLP have attempted to wrangle with how
learning systems that interact with humans should be constrained to behave
ethically. One proposal in this vein is the construction of morality models
that can take in arbitrary text and output a moral judgment about the situation
described. In this work, we focus on a single case study of the recently
proposed Delphi model and offer a critique of the project's proposed method of
automating morality judgments. Through an audit of Delphi, we examine broader
issues that would be applicable to any similar attempt. We conclude with a
discussion of how machine ethics could usefully proceed, by focusing on current
and near-future uses of technology, in a way that centers around transparency,
democratic values, and allows for straightforward accountability.
