ABSTRACT
Singer and Regan, Taylor and Callicott, Leopold, Naess and the new animists: all these theorists have tried to expand the moral universe, widening the circle the duties and responsibilities to include animals, other living things, and even rivers and mountains. The most famous argument of this sort is the so-called ontological argument for the existence of a supreme being. The seductive powers of ontological arguments show up the frailty of human psychology. One of the most prominent exemplars of North American wilderness ethics is found in the work of Holmes Rolston III arguing that wilderness has both intrinsic and instrumental value. Rolstons emergentist view is that self-regulating and self-maintaining autopoietic systems emerge from physical and chemical systems, and out of these self-regulating systems there emerge cultural systems. The term autopoiesis was coined by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to describe the features of living systems.
