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.

中文翻译：

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先到先得？

等待时间在卫生和社会政策中被广泛用于做出资源分配决策，但尚不存在关于等待时间的道德意义的一般说明。我们提供这样的帐户。我们认为等待时间在本质上并不具有道德意义，但在一系列理论上令人信服的场景中使用它是合理的。首先，在存在足够公正的队列的情况下，有禁止线切割的公平义务。其次，当候选人处于相关相似的情况下时，按等待时间分配是有效的，相对于其他帕累托有效分配最大化分配平等，并接近等概率彩票的公平性。