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Consider the humble bus queue, what it tells us.

People line up waiting for a bus to arrive and sometimes are disappointed because the bus is so full that there is not room for all of them. If the driver says that there is room for only five, it is the first five in the line who get on. No one complains of this; it seems perfectly natural to them. But it isn’t, as we shall soon see.

Consider what would happen if politicians, sociologists, psychologists, lawyers, and intellectuals of any kind fell among them. As Shakespeare puts it in another context, hark what discord follows!

Why should the people who arrived first at the bus stop be the first to get on the bus? Just because they got there first, does it mean that their need to arrive at their destination is the most pressing or urgent? Certainly not. They may merely be enjoying themselves, idlers with nothing better to do. There may be people behind them in the queue who have something much more important to do.

They may have arrived first in the queue precisely because they are idlers. In fact, this is highly likely. Research ought to be done on those who arrive first at bus stops compared with those who arrive at the last minute. If it were found that, statistically, the latter were engaged upon much more socially important business, then we should pay heed to the Gospel of St. Luke: “And, behold, there are last which shall be first, and there are first that shall be last.”

Of course, things are not as simple as that in reality. A statistical generalization cannot be true in every case; therefore, if justice is to prevail in the allocation of scarce places on buses at crowded bus stops, more detailed investigations and classifications will be necessary.

The importance of the destination of each potential passenger should be taken into account. He who is going to work should take precedence over one who is merely amusing himself or paying a visit to relatives (unless the latter are very ill or dying, but we will come to the weight to be accorded to compassion in a moment).

Of course, not all work is of equal importance from the social point of view. A nurse is more important than a person who serves, say, chocolate or makeup in a store. But is a person who works in a bank or an insurance office as important as a nurse, or perhaps even more important? These are deep questions that require close study to find the answers, though of course those answers will remain a matter of discussion if not of dispute.

But we cannot be entirely utilitarian in our approach as to who should be allowed to get on the bus first in conditions of shortage of space. We must not be inhuman. The old, the ill, the handicapped also have their claims.

But who are to count as the ill? For example, are those with psychiatric conditions ill? Let us not forget that suffering is a subjective state, not necessarily proportionate to the cause that excites it. Grief is worse than a cold. Some people overcome handicaps with panache even though, to outside observers, those handicaps would seem grave and even insuperable. And how are the claims of old age, which usually entails retirement, to be balanced against those of work to be done by younger members of the queue?

I hope by now it is clear that the just and compassionate allocation of limited places on a bus to people waiting for buses in long lines is not a simple matter, but rather a highly complex one. It cannot be straightforwardly a matter of first come, first served, the equivalent of laissez-faire in economics. A scale of desert in the allocation of places, one that reduces to a single scale, rather like that of the felicific calculus beloved of utilitarian philosophers (the greatest happiness of the greatest number), ought to be developed and validated.

Once this has been done, a proper form could be distributed to people who wanted to join a bus queue. Those with the highest score would be let onto the bus first, and those with the lowest would have the longest wait. In the most unworthy cases, they would never be let on.

Naturally, with any such system there would be the possibility of fraud. People might not—some would not—answer the questions truthfully, and it wouldn’t be very difficult to guess the answers that would get you onto the bus quicker. Very soon a de facto competition in lying might develop.

Therefore, a system of inspection will have to be set up. It will not, of course, have to inspect every case; the threat of such inspection, with concomitant punishment if fraud were found, should be sufficient to deter queue jumpers. If someone were found to have been cheating, he could be fined or even, on reoffending, be excluded from all buses for a time, according to how frequently he had offended. This in turn will require a system both of recording and identification, for how otherwise would exclusion be enforced? And we wouldn’t want punishment to be a mere dead letter, would we?

No doubt some will object that the proposed system, besides any doubts about the correctness of the scoring system, would be cumbersome, inefficient, time-consuming, and expensive—and error-prone. (To the latter objection, there could always be, in fact there would have to be, a system of appeal.) But surely the light of the goal, justice in the allocation of places on crowded buses, is worth the candle of the apparatus necessary to produce it? We should never lose sight of the ideal. If we are put off by the anticipation of difficulties, we would never do anything.

What is clear is that the present system of queuing for buses and allocation of places on crowded buses is untenable, at least if we value justice and compassion. How grateful we should be to politicians, sociologists, psychologists, lawyers, and intellectuals for drawing our attention to this and providing us with the means to overcome a previously unrecognized problem.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).