> But as long as someone, anyone, involved in the accident can be condemned as sinful (in many cases the sin of being tired from overworking forced on them by societal pressures), it can be explained away.
And indeed if we look at railway safety this is exactly what we saw. Originally, railway companies would say well, yes two passenger trains collided, killing a hundred people, but conveniently for us both drivers died in the collision so we'll blame them. The problem wasn't us, the railway company, who are great, it's those awful drivers, who fortunately are now dead so no need to investigate further. In fact, since there's no body to examine we can confidently declare that one of the drivers was drunk. Which explains why we've told his widow that she won't be receiving one penny from the death-in-service fund.
Eventually (this kept happening, because of course it did) coroners weren't talking this bullshit, and they said it seems like the problem isn't these lone drivers who are conveniently dead, it's the company hiring them. If the drivers aren't good enough, the company should get better drivers. If instead the problem is elsewhere (e.g. maybe it'd be a good idea to invent signals so that you know if a train just around the corner has broken down so that your express doesn't hurtle into it at full speed...) that's something for the railway company too. This didn't magically fix things overnight, but it did push back against the useless "blame the driver" narrative.
Modern safety agencies, focused on a blameless "Learn from the past, prevent future accidents" model have improved things considerably, but that did not happen automatically, somebody had to call the corporate entities on their bullshit. Maybe we should call individual private car owners on their bullshit too.
One trend I don't like is people who resist the word "accident". It's an accident unless you think it was done on purpose. Accident prevention is a thing. We can, and should, prevent accidents.
And indeed if we look at railway safety this is exactly what we saw. Originally, railway companies would say well, yes two passenger trains collided, killing a hundred people, but conveniently for us both drivers died in the collision so we'll blame them. The problem wasn't us, the railway company, who are great, it's those awful drivers, who fortunately are now dead so no need to investigate further. In fact, since there's no body to examine we can confidently declare that one of the drivers was drunk. Which explains why we've told his widow that she won't be receiving one penny from the death-in-service fund.
Eventually (this kept happening, because of course it did) coroners weren't talking this bullshit, and they said it seems like the problem isn't these lone drivers who are conveniently dead, it's the company hiring them. If the drivers aren't good enough, the company should get better drivers. If instead the problem is elsewhere (e.g. maybe it'd be a good idea to invent signals so that you know if a train just around the corner has broken down so that your express doesn't hurtle into it at full speed...) that's something for the railway company too. This didn't magically fix things overnight, but it did push back against the useless "blame the driver" narrative.
Modern safety agencies, focused on a blameless "Learn from the past, prevent future accidents" model have improved things considerably, but that did not happen automatically, somebody had to call the corporate entities on their bullshit. Maybe we should call individual private car owners on their bullshit too.
One trend I don't like is people who resist the word "accident". It's an accident unless you think it was done on purpose. Accident prevention is a thing. We can, and should, prevent accidents.