Triage forces an explicit answer to a question medicine ordinarily avoids, which is whose life to save when not all can be saved, and the protocols written for that purpose reveal how unstable the professional consensus is. Criteria that maximise lives saved, criteria that maximise life-years, criteria that give priority to the young on the ground that they have had less, and criteria that refuse any comparison of lives all have serious defenders, and they produce different allocations from the same facts. What the protocols mostly do is choose without announcing that a choice has been made, since a document stating that a sixty-year-old ranks below a thirty-year-old is politically impossible while a scoring system carrying the same implication is not. Scoring converts a contested judgement into an administrative output, which is precisely its appeal.