Justice and allocation of medical resources.

In one of a series of short articles on philosophical medical ethics, Gillon examines the principle of justice as it applies to adjudicating competing claims for the distribution of scarce medical resources. He describes Aristotle's theory of justice--with its demands of formal equity, impartiality, and fairness--and then considers various substantive criteria that have been proposed to justify choosing among competing candidates for scarce resources. In the absence of an acceptable way to give consistent moral priority to any of the criteria, he concludes, practical systems should be set up to resolve conflicts by taking into account the fundamental moral values of respect for autonomy, beneficence, and nonmaleficence while incorporating Aristotle's formal principle of justice.