It certainly simplifies things, which is why perhaps the air travel question is so much easier to make a conclusion on.

"Well, if a pilot makes a mistake, we can't exactly punish him after the fact in most cases... so our normal primitive blame systems won't work here. Hmm, what can we do instead?"

And by George, we stumbled upon an actual way to improve the whole damn thing. Perhaps only by a trick of psychology that we couldn't apply blame and fool ourselves into thinking it was working.