This paper presents preliminary solutions to three conceptual problems posed by the use of triage to sort candidates for scarce medical resources: (1) By what criteria are the candidates grouped? (2) To what extent can triage be justified? (3) Under what conditions are different versions of triage equivalent? Four explicit methods of applying triage are described and compared, with the aid of examples. The extent to which they either maximize expected utility or show cost-benefit dominance is discussed. And cases in (...) which one triage method reduces to another are contrasted with others where no such reduction occurs. (shrink)