Opponents say that such a market would encourage criminals by making it easier for them to claim that their stolen organs were legal. Legalization of the organ trade carries with it its own sense of justice as well. Continuing black-market trade creates further disparity on the demand side: only the rich can afford such organs. Legalization of the international organ trade could lead to increased supply, lowering prices so that persons outside the wealthiest segments could afford such organs as well. Exploitation arguments generally come from two main areas:

Physical exploitation suggests that the operations in question are quite risky, and, taking place in third-world hospitals or "back-alleys", even more risky. Yet, if the operations in question can be made safe, there is little threat to the donor. Financial exploitation suggests that the donor (especially in the Indian subcontinent and Africa) are not paid enough. Commonly, accounts from persons who have sold organs in both legal and black market circumstances put the prices at between $150 and $5,000, depending on the local laws, supply of ready donors and scope of the transplant operation. In Chennai, India, where one of the largest black markets for organs is known to exist, studies have placed the average sale price at little over $1,000. Many accounts also exist of donors being postoperatively denied their promised pay.The New Cannibalism is a phrase coined by anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes in 1998 for an article written for The New Internationalist.
Some economists have advocated going as far as allowing the sale of organs. The New York Times reported that "Gary Becker and Julio Jorge Elias argued in a recent paper that monetary incentives would increase the supply of organs for transplant sufficiently to eliminate the very large queues in organ markets, and the suffering and deaths of many of those waiting, without increasing the total cost of transplant surgery by more than 12 percent." Iran allows the sale of kidneys and has no waiting list. Organ futures have been proposed to incentivise donation through direct or indirect compensation. The primary argument against such proposals is a moral one; as the article notes, many find such a suggestion repugnant. As the National Kidney Foundation puts it, "Offering direct or indirect economic benefits in exchange for organ donation is inconsistent with our values as a society. Any attempt to assign a monetary value to the human body, or body parts, either arbitrarily, or through market forces, diminishes human dignity." An opt-out system ("dissent solution"), in which a potential donor or his/her relatives must take specific action to be excluded from organ donation, rather than specific action to be included. This model is used in several European countries, such as Austria, which has a registration rate eight times that of Germany, which uses an opt-in system. Social incentive programs, wherein members sign a legal agreement to direct their organs first to other members who are on the transplant waiting list.