Rights and Responsibilities Between Buddy Divers

[kelemvor]

I never dive with a buddy who is breathing something different. So, everything you are looking at becomes invalid.

Good call. I did that on a 90' dive once. The dive was arranged by an LDS and they said they had a buddy for me already. When we got on the boat, he was the only diver without nitrox. So.. we had limited dive times, and hours of surface intervals. MOD was not an issue because I didn't bring a shovel. During the second dive he hovered about 15 feet above to help cope with his NDL. It was a frustrating experience, and one I don't want to repeat.

I guess I could have thumbed the dive, but after a 2 hour car ride (each way) and a 2 hour boat ride (each way) it was a LOT to walk away from. I'm glad I didn't - it's my favorite dive in memory, but it could have been even better had we both been on nitrox.

To answer the original question, I would go down to 115 or 125 on 36 for a brief time to rescue someone. I'd feel a little hesitant about 125, but I think I'd do it. I'd have no concerns about 115.

I would not be surprised at all to see a diver refuse a pony bottle they had never used one. A refusal wouldn't concern me at all. You never mentioned what the pony had in it. 36% also?

 

[Searcaigh]

Personally I would never agree to buddy with somebody using a different gas mix if there is no hard bottom such as a wall dive. On a scenario like this …. two solo divers and hopefully with some suitable redundant gas supplies for each.

Locally my square profile recreational deep dives have a hard bottom bottom of 32M, so the original OP scenario does not occur, but sometimes I may be on a nitrox mix and an instabuddy on air, in this case the instabuddy has a shorter dive. The instabuddy either descends with me and ascends solo or descends solo 10 minutes after me and ascends with me, but this is all discussed beforehand. Locally I always dive with a pony.

 

[NAM001]

I have to agree with you and that is what i think bothers me. At one time a buddy ment something, you were skilled and dove with a buddy when the unhandleable occured. Over time the buddy became less of backup and more of a routinely used tool when we just didnt want to bother with being skilled. Now buddies area necessary piece of equipment like the regulator for many to dive. Personally I think that 2 newbies are actually solo..... Dir came into play with all thier concepts, and low and behold the TEAM concept became a reinvention of the buddy with some extra stuff thrown in. So when i heard you use the word team in a non technical diving aspect i visioned just another broke down buddy system with a more sophisticated name attached to it. Although as it turned out , that discription is pretty accurate. There are to many that can pronounce the words buddy or team but dont know what they mean.

---------- Post added June 25th, 2014 at 09:28 AM ----------

I think my other recent response clarifies my position. But I consider any buddy group a "team" and because we (should) will share common goals. If not I will happily move on to another person or go solo and adjust accordingly. I try to avoid "Thunderdome Diving" at all cost.

 

[Carl_F]

Questions:

1. If the air diver violates the dive plan and descends to 115 fsw where he promptly gets in trouble and needs help, is the EANx diver morally obligated to make an attempt to save his buddy even though he is at some risk of experiencing a CNS hit?
2. What if the air diver descends to 125 fsw and gets in trouble (in excess of 1.6 ATA PP oxygen for the EANx diver)?
3. If during the Buddy Briefing, the EANx diver offers the air diver a complete pony rig, and the air diver refuses, would that change your opinion? (obviously, the pony rig would only be a factor for this question if the primary system failed or an OOA situation was causative)

No to all questions. Would I accept the risk and descend to help? It depends. If it's clearly life and death for the buddy? I think I would accept the risk. Or I'd like to think I would if there is clear probability of being able to perform a successful rescue. If I don't see a reg in the mouth and no bubbles apparent and he's descending into the blue, I have serious reservations that I'd go below 125 to attempt a rescue.

Very scenario and situation dependent. Overall, I don't see a little above 1.6 PPO2 to be a high risk but recognize that's a guess since I don't know my personal O2 tolerance.

Carl

 

[modustollens]

Moral questions can be tricky if the concept of morality is not adequately explicated.


There are many schools of thought on this question: deontology, which emphasizes the importance of moral duties at the expense of the good or bad results; utilitarianism, which requires a prudent measuring of the harm or lack of harm created by certain actions or certain rules of action. Divine command theory - the content of moral rules come from religion and we are duty bound to follow them (hence divine command theory is akin to deontology rather than consequentialism). Virtue theory, stemming from Aristotle. And so on. To be curt, the meta-ethics must be complete else the ethics is vague (Meta-ethics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

I tend to think that in our practical life our actual actions of applied ethics are informed by a mixture of these different theories, though the components are often not analyzed out.

For example, most would claim that we have a (deontological) duty to assist those in need; but as many reported in previous posts, any rescue must not produce more victims (this is a consequentialist condition which over-rides the duty to assist).

The deontological duty to assist those in need - I doubt many people would deny that this exists; and we see many examples of this in areas of life outside of diving where there is not a formal coupling of the duty of mutual assistance as is the case with the dive buddy. Of course, people are often inconsistent applying this principle. If you are interested about your own consistency you can try the 'drowning child problem': The Drowning Child

Measuring up the utility of action is difficult for it is often hard to predict risk or to measure harm; so, making a prediction of what one would do from a utilitarian orientation is difficult for under this paradigm the unique facts matter in so far as the unique facts will influence the calculation of utility.

But, if it is true that our applied ethics is a mixture of theories having mutually exclusive conditions (and deontology and utilitarianism are mutually exclusive in so far as deontology ignores utility calculations - this difference pops up in policy considerations regarding drug and prostitution when 'harm reduction' strategies are suggested instead of the absolute prohibitions from the 'law and order' crowd) then decisions in the abstract will have little meaning.

That said, I would make it clear to any buddy that I myself use a mixture of moral reasoning and that my duty to assist is limited by risky consequences; risky consequences created by wilful neglect of the dive plan on the part of the buddy are not going to be insured, so to speak, by me. I would make this clear at the beginning or pre-dive. Indeed, the buddy, in so far as he willingly places himself in harm's way willingly pollutes or negates his obligation to render assistance to me should I have an accident; maintaining that reciprocity of duty to assist is, I think, a necessary condition for maintaining a duty to assist on my part, provided the consequences of assisting are not unduly harmful.

MT

 

[Dr. Lecter]

the meta-ethics must be complete else the ethics is vague

The ethics will remain vague regardless, as there is no logical connection between any series of is statements and a given ought statement. Like I said, this belongs in The Pub.

 

[Blyslv]

Anybody here have a climbing background? I'm thinking of alpine climbs, or multi pitch or multi day mountain adventures. the kind where you rope up with someone and trust them with your life for the duration of the climb.

It seems that there are some commonalities, but also a lot of differences. Things like the difference between objective and subjective risk, commitment to the other person (does an insta-buddy merit less commitment than a long time friend?), and communication skills.

I've done very few dives, so i don't have much to offer. but I will say I was shocked at some of the behavior of the insta-buddies I was with, especially the ones that dove with a camera! I don't think anyone asked me how much air I had on a dive, although I tried to ask each one once during a dive, about halfway through. This made me consider myself to be essentially diving alone in a group. I had mixed feeling about that and it was one of the reasons I tried not to go much beyond 20 meters.

I am going someplace new in a few weeks, and I expect a different culture and different attitudes. I'm just not sure what.

Anyway, just some random thoughts.

 

[modustollens]

"The ethics will remain vague regardless, as there is no logical connection between any series of is statements and a given ought statement. Like I said, this belongs in The Pub."

'Is' statements are either statements of identity or statements of fact or statements of predication; perhaps there are others. And it is quite popular to claim that an 'ought' cannot be derived from an 'is' vis a vis a statement of fact. Sure: G.E. Moore made this point in 1903, and Hume even earlier. And this is not problematic for most people I would think. But the rejection of ethical naturalism is not the rejection of ethics per se. So, it is a bit premature to go to the pub yet.

But not all statements are either statements of fact or statements of identity or subject and predicate statements. Humans have values. And we can derive an 'ought' from value statements or combinations of value statements and facts. Sure, ethics can be vague if by 'vague' we mean anything not as certain as geometric proofs. But no reasonable person would apply that standard and there is a fallacy named for this (pseudoprecision); but that does not mean there is nothing meaningful to be said.

Is there anyone here who would deny that your house is burning down is neither a good nor bad thing but merely a flavourless fact? Most people value their homes; and the mere fact that it is on fire is not what makes the burning bad (or good, say, if you want the insurance money).

Divers employ values in their reasoning all the time. For example, consider the well known phrase: take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but bubbles. A ethical maxim derived from the attribution or recognition of the value of the environment. That claim is not derived from a mere set of 'is' statements. What values one has or creates is another problem and there are many differences too; and I am sure there is a lot to be said for how these are constructed too.

MT

 

[Blyslv]

[...]
And it is quite poplar to claim that an 'ought' cannot be derived from an 'is' vis a vis a statement of fact.

Do some people bypass the buddy conundrum by solo diving right from the beech? If your girlfriend did that would you call her a birch? Perhaps it's something that you oak not to do, but it's either that or not dive, which is like getting left in a larch.

might be time to go to sleep...

 

[Dr. Lecter]

"The ethics will remain vague regardless, as there is no logical connection between any series of is statements and a given ought statement. Like I said, this belongs in The Pub."

'Is' statements are either statements of identity or statements of fact or statements of predication; perhaps there are others. And it is quite poplar to claim that an 'ought' cannot be derived from an 'is' vis a vis a statement of fact. Sure: G.E. Moore made this point in 1903, and Hume even earlier. And this is not problematic for most people I would think. But the rejection of ethical naturalism is not the rejection of ethics per se. So, it is a bit premature to go to the pub yet.

But not all statements are either statements of fact or statements of identity or subject and predicate statements. Humans have values. And we can derive an 'ought' from value statements or combinations of value statements and facts. Sure, ethics can be vague if by 'vague' we mean anything not as certain as geometric proofs. But no reasonable person would apply that standard and there is a fallacy named for this (pseudoprecision); but that does not mean there is nothing meaningful to be said.

Is there anyone here who would deny that your house is burning down is neither a good nor bad thing but merely a flavourless fact? Most people value their homes; and the mere fact that it is on fire is not what makes the burning bad (or good, say, if you want the insurance money).

Divers employ values in their reasoning all the time. For example, consider the well known phrase: take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but bubbles. A ethical maxim derived from the attribution or recognition of the value of the environment. That claim is not derived from a mere set of 'is' statements. What values one has or creates is another problem and there are many differences too; and I am sure there is a lot to be said for how these are constructed too.

MT

You're conflating recognition of inherent vagueness/irrationality with rejection.

While I might say I would strongly prefer, all else being equal, that my house not burn down, I would likely refrain from suggesting that its burning down or not factors into the grand scheme of things as either good or bad. I surely would not deny that my preference had, at the end of the analysis, nothing but my feelings supporting it.

Similarly, your cited phrase is hardly an ethical maxim, much less a commonly accepted one. Some of us collect fish, others spear them, still others loot wrecks, and many of us are willing to take a particularly pretty shell if it's confirmed to be unoccupied. But I'm glad you haven't tried to support its ought (not to) suggestion by reference to objective facts--it is indeed rooted purely in the gut feelings of a group of people whose opinions are not relevant to many and are no more or less valid than any others.

None of which really has much to do with Advanced SCUBA Discussions.