I would guess bio-printers will eventually make organ scarcity a problem of the past, but until that occurs should people be allowed to sell their organs? Moral philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards has long argued that the trade, while unsettling, should be permitted. An excerpt from her reasoning:

I find trade in organs as intuitively repugnant as does everyone else but strong feelings of a moral kind, by themselves, cannot form reliable guides for action. Remember the traditional reactions to inter-racial marriage, unfeminine women and homosexuality – themselves now widely regarded as repugnant? If we find the trade repugnant because of the harm it does to vendors, we must find the idea of making their situation worse by stopping the trade more repugnant. The worse we think it is to sell a kidney, the more repugnant should we find any objectively worse alternative. We should find it much more repugnant that the Turkish father should be forced to keep his kidney and watch his daughter die than that he should sell it and save her. We should also find our repugnance proportionately lessened if we could assure high standards of care that would make the harm minimal.

This does not prove conclusively that organ sales should be allowed; good arguments for prohibition may still be found. The fact that so many bad arguments are used, however, shows that good ones must be hard to come by, and it also suggests that our strong feelings of repugnance are systematically distorting our arguments. We are in effect treating the removal of our own feelings of disgust as more important than the real interests of the people on whose behalf we claim to be concerned. It is therefore morally essential to understand the power of these feelings so that we can think impartially about the problem.

In the meantime, until someone produces a far better argument than has yet appeared, there seems to be no escaping the provisional conclusion that the prohibition of the sale of organs does substantial harm of various sorts, that these have not been shown to be justified and therefore that we should not be trying to prevent the selling of organs but rather to lessen whatever harms are now involved and to increase the benefits to both vendors and purchasers by getting the trade properly regulated.•