[Sirened]

> You can swerve onto the sidewalk but

I feel like that's not realistic either—when you encounter these sorts of situations in real life, you don't really make a thought out choice because it happens so fast. People swerve and crash into trees trying to avoid rabbits, it's not a reasoned thing.

These problems do, however, come up fairly often in so many other areas. Cryptography is probably one near and dear to many people's hearts here—supporting cryptography directly saves many lives (journalists in totalitarian regimes, people in abusive relationships, the general wellbeing of people being able to communicate securely for a myriad of industrial purposes, etc.) but it also, to a lesser degree, directly leads to some deaths (terrorists are able to organize and hide their plans). Do you spend your life developing more powerful cryptographic algorithms knowing that it will have some small negative outcome that your work is partially responsible for? Or do you do nothing at all and have a larger number of people suffer as a result of you not having produced a work.