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On Sun, 16 Apr 1995 devon@ol*.ch* wrote: > I'm enjoying my new home in Switzerland where there is no certification > and if you die it's your own damn fault. This provides me with a golden opportunity to get something off my chest that's been bugging me for a while. What can't the U.S. be like this? I mean seriously...is it only lawyers that have screwed up things? Or is it that our society has evolved to the point where people sincerely cannot accept responsibility for their own actions? I've been listening to the audio tapes from the tek95 meetings lately. One of the sessions dealt with legal issues and underscored the importance of "community standards" in determining outcomes of lawsuits. These are not necessarily written standards, but more like accepted conventtions within the community (in this case, the community of technical divers). If so, then the solution seems crystal clear to me. As far as I can see, the "technical diving" thing is still young enough that community standards are still ambiguous. So it's not too late to define these standards. I suggest we create the "community standard" that we all want! I think the "standard" can be summed up in two sentences: "WHATEVER happens to you when you willingly go underwater is COMPLETELY and ENTIRELY your own responsibility! If you cannot accept this responsibility, stay out of the water!" If a regulator fails in the middle of a dive, the diver cannot blame the manufacturer because the diver willingly accepted the risk of a regulator failure the moment they dipped below the surface. If a charter boat captain does something really stupid and a diver gets hurt or killed, the diver has nobody to blame because he or she accepted that risk when he or she hired that boat captain. Give me any example where a diver gets hurt, and I will explain why it is ultimately the diver's fault. On day *one* of ANY technical diving course (I want to say any diving course at all, but we'll limit it to technical-type diving courses for this discussion), the instructor would say to the students: "In diving, we have a credo that is: 'WHATEVER happens to you when you willingly go underwater is COMPLETELY and ENTIRELY your own responsibility! If you cannot accept this responsibility, stay out of the water!' If any of you do not understand this, I will explain it to you now. If any of you are not willing to accept this, then you may withdraw from this course and receive a full refund. If you are going to willfully engage in any diving after this course, you MUST understand and accept this credo." Instructors would not "certify" people, they would only teach them. The burden of responsibility would fall on the student to *learn* the material, not on the instructor to teach the material. It would be up to the student to trust whether or not the information he or she received from the instructor is correct and complete. If the student doubted this, then he or she should do their own research to verify it. If the instructor provided bogus information to the student and the student believed it and got hurt, it would be the student's fault for having not independently researched it. All of this could and should be hammered into the student throughout all courses. The only time an instructor should be sued is if he or she did not make these points clear to a diver during the course. The Technical Divers' credo should appear everywhere: in magazines and books, throughout instruction manuals, on T-shirts and bumperstickers, on pins and caps, in disclaimer statements, in product manuals, on e-mail signatures...everywhere. Eventually, this would become a "community standard". The attitude would be: "These are the rules of the game...if you cannot accept these rules, than do not play the game. Period." If this attitude was truely established as a clear "community standard" within the technical diving community, I would think that fewer lawsuits against people would win, and thus fewer lawsuits would be filed. Liability insurance would no longer be necessary, and costs of things (such as rebreathers) would come down. I'm sure I'm being totally naive, but it just seems to be so simple. Most of us believe the credo anyway, so if we continue to emphazize it everywhere, it should eventually be elevated to the level of "community standard". I've been thinking about this for a long time. If anyone wants me to elaborate further on any of these points, I'd be more than happy to. O.K., that's my piece. 'nuff said... Aloha, Rich ******************************************************************* Richard Pyle deepreef@bi*.bi*.ha*.or* "WHATEVER happens to you when you willingly go underwater is COMPLETELY and ENTIRELY your own responsibility! If you cannot accept this responsibility, stay out of the water!" *******************************************************************
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