ABSTRACT
Within the social services, the procedures used to allocate benefits play an important role in the authors's assessment of the fairness of the allocation. There are at least two related problems which must be dealt with when discussing procedural fairness and rationing the social services. The first problem is whether it is possible to define a general concept of procedural fairness which will enable us to determine whether or not an allocative procedure is fair. The second version of the argument that procedures cannot be considered as distinct denies that there is any logical separation between processes and the end-states to which they give rise. The analogy with social service procedures is that the approximate equality condition may be violated when there are end-state reasons for weighting the chance of one type of person or case more highly than that of others.
