I'm not claiming there is no trade-off saving 400 more people (as basically all everyone replied to me) but engineers have an implicit agreement with the society and ethical practice is a big part of engineering, at least this is what I was taught. The reason this trade-off is irrelevant is because if you're not employed by an aeroapace company, you do not have any implicit responsiblity regarding those 400 people. So what is being claimed here is not that we all should stop and save those 400 people. E.g. I work for a telematics company I'm absolutely responsible of every person injured in a car crash that my engineering solutions could save them. But the same cannot be said about casualties in airplane crashes.
I used to work for Boeing on the 757 stabilizer trim system. I can verify that the engineers who work on such flight critical systems are very much aware of their responsibilities to make them as safe as they can. None of them want anything to do with creating an unsafe design.
