ABSTRACT
Triage was first used by surgeons on the battlefield to decide whom to operate on when a shortage of doctors, equipment and time made it impossible to treat all the wounded men before they died. Although the principle of triage has often been used in practice in order to decide how to distribute medical resources under conditions of scarcity or emergency, it has so far had fairly little theoretical consideration. It might be possible to argue that utilitarianism, ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’, does not have these consequences. But even the fact that it might show two things about triage. One is that triage does not necessarily produce the same moral results as utilitarianism, which shows that it cannot simply be an application of the utilitarianism principle. The other is that to apply utilitarianism rather than triage, if it would lead to consequences of the sort, seems distinctly unjust.
