Wilkinson proposed that health systems should aim to prioritise patients who have the highest chance of survival, based on Taurek’s ‘lifeboat’ experiment, where the general public chose to save five patients instead of one patient. This is no more or less true of saying that the current approaches are all in line with a utilitarian approach of maximising benefits. However, some Jewish and Islamic scholars advocated a non-utilitarian approach in saying that once treatment has begun it is not permissible to reallocate the treatment. In such matters bioethical principles must be considered to better provide equity for patients. However, when bioethical principles come into conflict in priority setting, it indicates the lack of guidelines to strike a positive balance between benefits and harms in decision-making...