My suggestion to David is that he will find the cognitive research answers to his questions in such books as 'Managing the Risk of Organisational Accidents' (Reason), or 'Beyond Aviation Human Factors' by Maurino et al.
Before giving an oversimplified summary, one point of clarification. My understanding is that CX is not just MONITORING its pilots, but applying sanctions at an arbitrary cutoff point.
Now - David is correct that pilots are just like other people. But unfortunately they are ordinary people who do a job which has extraordinary consequences if they fail.
So - what do 'ordinary' people do? Their lives are dominated by pressures which are 100% certain - mortgages, raising children, etc. When confronted by a potential material sanction for calling in sick they will be most likely to adopt the cognitive strategy called 'frequency gambling'. That is - "even when sick I am highly unlikely to crash the aeroplane, but the mortgage payment is 100% certain." So - they go to work.
This may not be very nice for passengers, but pilots are just ordinary people like you and me. Statistically a sick pilot (where sick is defined as having a condition which impairs normal sensory perceptions) is 7.5 times more likely to commit a safety critical error than one who is not sick in that way. This means (statistically) that a safety critical error will occur about once every 10,000 flight cycles instead of once every 75,000 cycles (the industry average. About 1 in 10 safety critical errors lead to an actual accident).
Some pilots will behave as David advocates. Most - being ordinary human beings - will not. That is not a statement about how people OUGHT to behave. It is just the reality of how most people are. The frequency across the whole profession is reflected in these figures. We know from the stats that punitive management regimes where pilots are put under pressure to work against their better judgement, produce exactly these increases in the frequency of critical incidents.
So those are the kind of odds that CX risk managers are playing with. When David says that that is OK, he is saying that those sorts of odds are OK. That is his judgement call. It isn't mine. I will also be thoroughly pissed off if the accident, when it happens, is one where a CX plane runs into the one I am flying in.
What David cannot do is have it both ways. He cannot on the one had insist that pilots are just like other people, and then expect them to behave in ways that other people do not.