Until a dispute is resolved in favor of one of the participating parties, it might be supposed that once each party has articulated its argument and, in so doing, established the merit of its position relative to the positions of the other participants–as judged by the notorious Impartial Third Party–the arrangement of participants in order of their likelihood to emerge as victor is fixed in place. Such a supposition is not usually true, however, of disputes in which one of the parties advocates inaction. In most cases as these, the inaction advocates enjoy an advantage that grows steadily for as long as the dispute remains unresolved. Why? Because the outcome they seek is being realized as a condition of the dispute process itself. In the spirit of fairness, it would seem an honorable endeavor to nullify this advantage, but the complexity of the effort would render it financially and temporally costly, and the eventual solution–too tailor-made for wider applicability–would be marred by immeasurable subjectivity.

At the risk of belaboring the point, consider a dispute between four parties who respectively advocate options A through D, where option A represents the laissez-fair of inaction. For the same reason that it affords an advantage to the first party for no action to be taken on an issue until such time as the dispute is resolved, it is no better to adopt options B, C, or D during the disposition. The most equitable solution would be for the Impartial Third Party to devise a temporary fifth option E, created specifically for the purpose, and adopt it until one of the long-term options A through D prevailed at the conclusion. Crucially, so as to afford no advantage to any participants, option E would need to complicate equally each of the options being advocated by the four parties. This stipulation is, in part, what renders the creation of option E so costly that it isn’t observed in practice, not to mention that temporarily adopting an option contrary to all other options–no matter how equally so–is perceived as counter-productive.

In lieu of creating/adopting a temporary option, choosing inaction has become–has always been?–the de facto standard. To understand why, consider that adopting the inaction option for as long as the dispute remains unresolved generally doesn’t preclude or very much complicate the eventual fulfillment of any one of the other options. If a new bridge is being considered where one doesn’t already exist, postponing construction (adopting inaction) until after the pro-bridge party has won the dispute is no great cost, whereas any construction that has taken place will not only be considered a waste in the event that the dispute is resolved in favor of the anti-bridge, pro-inaction party, but also will necessitate additional work to return the site, as much as is possible, to the state it was in when the dispute began. To adopt during dispute resolution an option other than inaction ironically burdens inaction advocates with having to promote restorative action.

At this point, you might have guessed the nature of the exceptions whose existence is implied by my earlier use of the qualifiers usually and most. Keeping with the infrastructure theme, suppose a dispute concerns an aging bridge that grows less safe for every year it’s neglected. In this scenario, the advantage that would otherwise be enjoyed by the inaction advocates is matched and thereby nullified by the growing urgency of the action advocates’ calls for bridge repair.

Thus far, I’ve offered no explanation as to why temporary adoption of what is advocated by one of the parties involved in a dispute typically endows that party with an advantage, relying instead on the intuitive sense that it is so. Oh, metaphors are dependably on hand–each a window with the promise of unique perspective: to accept, in effect, an opponent’s terms of engagement is a demoralizing concession that weighs heavily on one’s pride and plants the seed of defeat; it’s an arm-wrestling match that begins off-center–but I struggle to elucidate the matter past them. The law of diminishing returns, it seems, discourages beyond this point entertaining the nested layers of ‘why?’