[catlikesshrimp]

"The number of fatalities in the US would drop from 40,000 annually to 40. Would you wave that wand?"

This strawmam is bordering offtopic fiction. Only the 40k yearly deaths is based on reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

[sowbug]

So is the trolley problem, which this problem restates. I'm not sure what you're adding by observing that a hypothetical situation is hypothetical.