First Come, First Served?

Abstract

Waiting time is widely used in health and social policy to make resource allocation decisions, yet no general account of the moral significance of waiting time exists. We provide such an account. We argue that waiting time is not intrinsically morally significant, but its use is justified across a range of pretheoretically compelling scenarios. First, there is a duty of fairness prohibiting line cutting where a sufficiently just queue exists. Second, where candidates are in relevantly similar circumstances, allocating by waiting time is efficient, maximizes distribution equality relative to other Pareto efficient distributions, and approaches the fairness of an equiprobable lottery.