I know I'm not supposed to do this on the Internet, much less on scubaboard, but I just re-read the original post (after reading each reply until now), and I've got some observations on the initial statement, plus some of the responses.
Lots of people seem to have read and reacted far more to the provocative title (great marketing job!) than the body of the post.
First, nowhere in Gareth Lock's excellent post does he say that the individual should not
bear responsibility, and nowhere does he advocate some of the strict regulations some people see as the inevitable result of any change to current practice. The closest he comes to suggesting any change in how the diving community treats personal responsibility is in the very mild statement:
So the next time you read about a diver making a stupid mistake, or ‘breaking the rules’, look deeper into the story and understand how it made sense to them at the time.
That sounds 100% in line with the prohibition against blaming the victim that's a rule in the Accidents & Incidents forum.
I think in the discussion that has followed, that the word "responsible" is being used in different ways. A diver who naively makes a stupid mistake may suffer the consequences (
bearing the responsibility), but without knowledge and understanding of the context, they simply cannot make an informed decision or necessarily be
held responsible by others. The idea that the decision "made sense at the time" probably means that the diver thought they
were making a responsible choice, but they didn't know what they didn't know.
This doesn't necessarily mean that someone
else (their original instructor, the dm, their buddy, etc) is responsible for their safety or decision, and it doesn't absolve the diver of the obligation to improve (training, skills, etc) in order to be able to make an informed decision -- that obligation remains their responsibility. I read gloc's post as saying that in the kind of accident analysis that we see here, holding a diver
responsible for an decision that they were of incapable of making responsibly does not advance overall safety of the sport or help the individual. He doesn't offer a prescription for change, and even says:
This isn't about having a rule for each situation and getting people to follow them, because we know that won't work. Diving is a recreational activity which has a residual risk which cannot be removed.
The conclusion that any model other than each individual being fully responsible for their decisions will lead to some kind of complex legal regulation of the practice of SCUBA diving is nonsense, and holding up OSHA as an example of the form of the regulations is simply a scare tactic.
First of all, please start with the first letter in OSHA -- the "O" for Occupational. The post that started this discussion, and most of the ones that follow, is about recreational SCUBA diving, not the practice as an occupation. Looking to other, comparable, recreational activities, there's remarkably little regulation despite their greater number of participants (and likely higher injury rates, though not fatalities). Rock climbing, sky-diving, off-road bicycle & motorcycle riding, skiing and snowboarding are free of government regulation, despite high-profile celebrity deaths and less industry self-regulation (except for sky diving) than diving. Minimal regulation -- requiring helmet use for all participants in each of those sports -- would probably be a much better benefit to society, at lower cost, than any of the regulation that people fear would be imposed on diving, yet that hasn't happened. Holding a private pilot's license has been brought up as an example of a regulated hobby, but I'd say that it's not comparable because SCUBA divers aren't responsible (see, that word again) for passengers who are incompetent of practicing the recreation themselves, and because a diver who has an accident is unlikely to crash-land on innocent bystanders.
Almost everyone writing in this thread seems to agree that better diver education would be beneficial in allowing a diver to have the knowledge and skills to take better responsibility for their own risks, and many people point out inconsistent, value-priced, watered-down training as a major problem. Perhaps more OSHA-style regulation of SCUBA diving is an answer...but regulation of the practice of the occupation of providing SCUBA instruction, with the aim of improving the quality and depth of training, not regulation of the practices of individual recreational divers.
