Personally, I don't think the dive boat operator should be held liable. I don't think any of the training agencies here in the U.S. encourage solo diving, and with only 14 dives under his belt, I doubt it was long enough after his training for him to have forgotten the idea of diving with a buddy. For whatever reason, he chose to dive without a buddy, and whether that had any effect on his death, it was still his choice to make.
I'm not sure what I would do if I were a dive boat operator, and someone along for the excursion wanted to dive solo. My guess is, most such businesses here in the U.S. already require signed waivers regarding liability issues, which likely include clauses concerning incidents arising from practices deemed unsafe by various dive agencies. While that's not absolute protection from litigation, it would at least demonstrate that the injured or deceased diver acknowledged the risks before the dive, and chose to do so anyway.
This is another case where it would be interesting if we had statistics on solo divers. While it can be easy to point to cases where a solo diver had a critical or fatal problem during the dive, it would have to be measured against the likelihood of the problem being lessened by having a dive buddy, and against the total number of solo dives in any given time period.
I'm not sure what I would do if I were a dive boat operator, and someone along for the excursion wanted to dive solo. My guess is, most such businesses here in the U.S. already require signed waivers regarding liability issues, which likely include clauses concerning incidents arising from practices deemed unsafe by various dive agencies. While that's not absolute protection from litigation, it would at least demonstrate that the injured or deceased diver acknowledged the risks before the dive, and chose to do so anyway.
This is another case where it would be interesting if we had statistics on solo divers. While it can be easy to point to cases where a solo diver had a critical or fatal problem during the dive, it would have to be measured against the likelihood of the problem being lessened by having a dive buddy, and against the total number of solo dives in any given time period.