Original Paper UDC 165.745: 17.021.2 Elvio Baccarini, Rijeka The Liberal View on Some Common Issues in the Moral Debate about Cloning Abstract It is from the mere announcement of the possibility of human cloning that moralists have for- mulated critical arguments against the permissibility of introducing this practice. A critical survey of these arguments, however, shows that they are not well founded, i.e. that frequently they are not such that they can be used as legitimate arguments in the debate about what is publicly permissible in a state, that they rely on mistaken premises, or that they are non cohe- rent with permissions in relation to other forms of human reproduction. Each argument in favor of the banning of human cloning is analyzed by at least one of these means: whether it is coherent with the fundamental principles of contemporary democracies (in particular, in relation to the right of every individual to pursue her system of value in her life); whether it relies on well-founded and widely accepted results of scientific researches; and, whether it is coherent with the usual and widely shared moral attitudes related to other forms of human reproduction. The most important argument that is taken as a good foundation for the prohibition of human cloning is the moral duty not to harm future persons. The result of the rejection of traditional moral arguments against human cloning does not represent an overall justification of human cloning: it only shows that new, or more sophisti- cated, arguments must be found if human cloning is to be banned. 1. Introduction The mere possibility of a hypothesis of human cloning has been the source of a great number of concerns, worries and reactions. In general, the reac- tions have been grounded on three sorts of arguments: the first states the intrinsic immorality of cloning; the second claims that cloning is intrinsi- cally a cause of harm to human beings (i.e. that it is not possible, or prob- able, that a procedure of cloning is applied and that some damage is not caused); the third says that cloning is not intrinsically, as such, a damaging procedure, but it has nevertheless to be banned because the only possible, or the most probable, motivations for it are morally unjustifiable. A review of the traditional arguments shows that they are problematic from the standpoint of political autonomy of the individual, a broadly shared value in contemporary political philosophy, as well as in the legal orders of contemporary states. The first sort of arguments tries to appeal to some widely accepted moral beliefs. However, a critical analysis indi- cates that these intuitions are not so unproblematic when taken without qualifications. On the other hand, the appeal to qualifications causes fur- ther troubles, because they need to rely on general metaphysical or relig- ious doctrines. This is not compatible with the basic principles of contem- porary democracy, which does not accept as a good crucial ground for pro- hibitions of actions the appeal to basic conceptions linked to religions or fundamental metaphysical questions, and, as such, heavily controversial. The second sort of arguments is based on wrong inferences from the scien-