The Baseline Problem: _Why What Counts as Inaction Is Itself a Governance Choice_

Every system that distinguishes intervention from non-intervention must first decide what counts as non-intervention. That decision—the specification of a null state, a default, a "doing nothing" against which all departures are measured—is itself an action, and a normatively loaded one. Yet it is routinely treated as a factual given rather than a governance choice. This paper formalizes baseline-selection as a distinct and logically prior form of institutional power. Baseline-selection is not the same as choice architecture, which arranges options within a baseline, nor as default-rule selection, which fixes the term that applies absent agreement; it is the prior act that determines what counts as an act requiring justification in the first place, who bears the burden of departure, and against what reference point harm and benefit are read. I trace the problem through three literatures that each came near it without naming it as a governance act: the moral philosophy of doing and allowing, where the baseline of harm is contested but treated as a problem of assessment; the legal-economic theory of entitlements and defaults, where the baseline is recognized as a construct but its selection is left undisciplined; and behavioral economics, which shows baselines to be causally operative rather than merely conceptual. I argue that baseline-selection has four characteristic failure modes—naturalization, drift, capture, and hardening—and I propose four legitimacy conditions in one-to-one correspondence with those failure modes—declaration, contestability, revisability, and reversibility-tracking—together with a fifth, access parity, that guards the contestation process itself against capture by the actors a baseline already favors. The governing claim is that the baseline is the most consequential thing an institution decides, precisely because it operates before the field of recognized action.