Yes, it's very tricky to take an action as complex as the decision to cheat on emissions test and boil down numbers describing the damage done to society. Havin

Yes, it's very tricky to take an action as complex as the decision to cheat on emissions test and boil down numbers describing the damage done to society. Having numbers like "they killed 59 people" certainly makes it easier to stir enough outrage, but it is an oversimplification. Would you agree with something like "the emissions they caused by cheating killed people, and our current best estimate of that is 59 (+- the confidence interval in the paper)". It's true that the decision to cheat may have had the benefit of getting safer cars to more people, but that is even harder to measure than deaths caused by emissions. To me, the decision to cheat wouldn't be justifiable and I would still be outraged because they knowingly did harm to the environment and society with the hopes that there would be a nearly un-measurable side benefit: increasing the average safety of cars relative to a world that doesn't exist. To me, it seems despicably irresponsible to gamble the well being of many human lives against something so hard to measure.