ABSTRACT
Holmes Rolston III was born 19 November 1932, the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, whose names he shares. Rolston felt a need to study philosophy in an attempt to explain the values he found in nature and to resolve the intellectual conflicts between his religious faith and the non-theistic naturalism of the biological sciences. Central to Rolston's theory of environmental ethics are the concepts 'intrinsic value' and 'holism'. In Rolston's theory, ecological wholes are intrinsically valuable. Rolston acknowledges that humans are in and part of nature, enfleshed or incarnate in vital respects. Evolutionary adapted fit tends to integrate intrinsic values in individuals and species within the habitats of the ecosystems they inhabit, Rolston contends. Rolston rejects the anthropocentric view that ecology is merely enlightened and expanded human self-interest. Borrowing a metaphor from contemporary physics, Rolston holds that integrity is a function of a 'field' interlocking species and individuals, predation and symbiosis, construction and destruction, aggradation and degradation.
