I kind of agree with you actually. To refine my comment above, if you accept the premise that there's criminal culpability here, then it's morally unacceptable

I kind of agree with you actually. To refine my comment above, if you accept the premise that there's criminal culpability here, then it's morally unacceptable to send an engineer to prison but not the executives who directed or authorized him to produce a defeat device. If, as you're saying, you don't accept that cheating on emissions tests is criminal in nature, then the issue should be settled through commercial and civil sanctions (which could perhaps include this engineer losing his license or charter, but more importantly should include those executives suffering severe financial penalties - perhaps that's a massive decline in value in their stock compensation's value caused by VW's mandatory exit from the US market.)