You can decide not to buy a cheesecake. What am I supposed to do when the pollution limits in my hometown are exceeded basically the whole winter?

All these examples are regulated by laws that control the extent of damage done. Clearly the society believes that the existence of these is, after accounting for the positive and negative effects, better than nonexistence. But, skirting the laws in most of these cases can result in harm/death, and should be treaded as such (e.g. selling cars with faulty brakes, selling cakes with too much trans fats... a bit harder to say for schooling noone has really figured out how to do it well on a large scale).

To elaborate a bit more on that (because I agree with you): selling cheesecake is not a crime, even though foods high in calories and sugar are known to cause obesity which causes premature death. It's the consumer's choice to buy these, but since they are recognized as potentially dangerous, the government does regulate the production of cheesecake. There are ingredients you cannot use, you have to disclose the ingredients you do use, and you have to include a nutrition facts label that shows how much sugar and how many calories are included in this cheesecake.

What VW did was like a cheesecake maker being told they're not allowed to use trans-fats, submitting their cheesecake to the FDA for testing to prove it doesn't use trans-fats, and then selling a completely different product on the market that does include trans-fats, but not printing that on the label.

You're allowed to sell cheesecake even if we know it's harmful, you just have to follow some regulations to make sure the harm is contained to a reasonable level and to ensure that consumers are well-informed of the risks they're undertaking. VW cheated the regulations and lied on their label. Of course they should be punished.

>Making cars is "statistical murder". Bad schools are "statistical murder". Selling cheesecake is "statistical murder".

Yeah, the question is how much. Cheating on emissions tests is definitely more murder than selling cheesecake.

> Yeah, the question is how much. Cheating on emissions tests is definitely more murder than selling cheesecake.

Is it?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/0...

> Scientists are asking people across the globe to lay off sugary drinks, linking the consumption to an estimated 184,000 adult deaths each year, including more than 25,000 Americans.

I wouldn't expect cheesecake to fare much differently.

Cheesecake =/= all sugary foods. It's not even a plurality.

Not to mention cheesecake is not pumped into the surrounding atmosphere as a gas where you breathe it involuntarily!