by Gregory E. Pence

About the author: This viewpoint is excerpted from Gregory E. Pence’s book Who’s Afraid of Human Cloning? Pence is professor of philosophy in the Schools of Medicine and Arts/Humanities at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. He frequently writes about bioethics, and his work has appeared in such publications as Newsweek, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

A clone is not a drone [robot]. Cloned humans would be people. It is a widely-accepted, general principle of modern philosophical ethics that people should be treated equally as moral agents unless there is a morally relevant reason to treat them otherwise. Every person should be treated with respect and as possessing equal moral worth until it is proven that he or she deserves to be treated otherwise.

This principle stems from...