The absence of action is called inaction . The idea of action, for its part, refers to the development, result or consequence of doing (generating, producing or executing something).
Inaction, therefore, is associated with stillness , passivity or inactivity . For example : "The footballer must add minutes of play little by little since he is coming from five months of inactivity due to an injury to his left knee" , "The government's inaction in the face of the growth of insecurity is alarming" , "If the leaders worlds maintain their inaction, global warming will continue to advance .
Let's take the case of a city that suffers a progressive increase in the level of pollution. This is mainly due to the lack of controls on industrial companies that dump their waste into a river and generate polluting emissions throughout the day. The neighbors, concerned about the situation, protest these events, but the mayor does not heed their complaints, allowing everything to remain the same. This inaction on the part of local authorities angers residents, who demand measures to protect the environment.
Now suppose that a police officer is touring a neighborhood when he observes how two armed criminals threaten a woman to steal her wallet. The victim, terrified, hands over his belongings to the thieves, who run away as the officer looks on, who does not intervene at any time, does not pursue them and does not even notify his colleagues of what happened. The inaction of the police officer is serious, since it represents a breach of his duty.
The examples just presented show us the presence of a nuance in the meaning of the term inaction that presents it as a much broader concept than the mere absence of action, since it speaks to us of the failure to comply with a moral obligation or the lack of commitment to with others. A lawnmower turned off, completely inactive, is not the same as a police officer deliberately refusing to help someone in trouble.
That said, it is not easy to find a synonym that encompasses this meaning in all its breadth, since we usually find the following two: inactivity and idleness . Although the first does not seem to give us much at a semantic level - and, in fact, it would not serve to clearly express the seriousness of the inaction of a police officer - the definition of idleness can provide us with complementary ideas to better understand depth the meaning of inaction .
An idle person has no obligation, he does nothing, he is idle. This adjective is also synonymous with useless , something without benefit , that does not bear fruit or that is not used to fulfill the function that was given to it at the time of its creation or that was assigned to it once discovered . With all this, we can return to the previous examples and note that several of these meanings respond correctly to what represents the lack of action on the part of a government when its people need it most or of the police force when faced with an armed robbery.
This definition hides a detail that may seem of little importance but exists to support its existence: we can only point out the inaction of something or someone that has the possibility of acting; We do not do it, for example, when talking about a rock. In other words, inanimate objects (those that do not have a soul or that do not show signs of life) do not incur inaction, since they do not incur action either. This also explains the disappointment that arises when we think about what someone could have done but decided to stand idly by.