Frans de Waal is C. H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Psychology Department, and Director of Living
Links, part of the Yerkes Primate Center, Emory University. His many books include Good Natured: The Origins of
Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals and Peacemaking among Primates (both from Harvard).
Summary
Frans de Waal takes on those who have declared ethics uniquely human. Making a compelling case for a morality
grounded in biology, he shows that ethical behavior, in humans and animals alike, is as much a matter of evolution
as any other trait.
"Evolutionary continuities have been sought in intelligence, language, tool making--anywhere but in morality.
Now a respected ethologist, Frans de Waal, tackles the problem from a novel angle...Good Natured is no touchy-feely
celebration of animal innocence, but a hardheaded study by a specialist in primate behavior with a wealth of observational
experience. Mr. de Waal, a research scientist at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center at Emory University, presents
his rich data in an accessible prose lit with flashes of wry humor and beautifully illustrated with his own vivid
photographs...Far from being half ape, half angel, torn between a moral sense that strives upward and an eons-old
bestial viciousness that drags us down, [we are portrayed by de Waal] as inheritors of a basically moral view of
life that has evolved over countless millenniums--not through some fictitious social contract between self-sufficient
individuals, but through the inevitable give-and-take of communal living...Anyone who cares about humans or their
future will profit from this excellent book, which sheds at least as much light on our own lives as it does on
those of other creatures."
--Derek Bickerton, New York Times Book Review
"So lucid is de Waal's manner of setting things forth that each time he finishes drawing an aspect of animal
morality, your first response is to wonder why you hadn't noticed it around the house, if not at a primate research
center, a remote island, or the zoo...[His] startling contributions to the way the general reader, or general citizen,
has of thinking seriously about `humans and other animals' might be permanent."
--Vicki Hearne, Village Voice Literary Supplement
"A sparkling master work...de Waal...is perhaps the most literate, entertaining, and soulful of the cognitive
ethologists...In Good Natured, [he] takes his humanizing project a step further, employing the rich lexicon of
human moral concepts as figures of speech to depict and lend meaning to the behavior of nonhuman animals...[A]
provocative, endearing, and brilliantly written book."
--Richard A. Shweder, Los Angeles Times
"Modern Darwinian evolutionary theory is based on individual reproduction, on 'selfish' genes that have
been selected at the expense of others that might act for the greater good. How then could survival of the fittest
lead to empathy?...This profound paradox has led some scholars in the past to assume that the emergence of morals
must be a transcendent process beyond the bounds of scientific explanation. Frans de Waal, one of the world's best-known
primatologists, has set out to prove that assumption wrong. On the final page of his startling new book, he asserts
that 'we seem to be reaching a point at which science can wrest morality from the hands of philosophers.' How the
author...came to this conclusion makes for compelling reading."
--William C. McGrew, Scientific American
"In [this] original and engaging new book...de Waal makes a strong case that the four ingredients of morality--empathy/sympathy,
sharing or reciprocity, justice/rules and peacemaking/reconciliation--are very much evident in other mammals...The
book employs a solid core of statistical evidence to bolster his case, but what makes his argument so compelling
is the richness of detail...De Waal is an original thinker and writes with such a light hand that the reader can
take a stimulating ride through his imaginative philosophical discourse...This work is...penetrating and profound."
--Vicki Croke, Boston Globe
"De Waal [questions]...whether the roots of human morality can be found in the behaviour of other species.
He is more or less ideally placed to answer that question, after years of perceptive research on captive chimpanzees,
bonobos and monkeys...As de Waal fans will already know, chimpanzees and other primates come alive as individuals
under his expert gaze...Sympathy, attachment, social norms, punishment, a sense of justice, reciprocation, peacemaking
and community concern--all are writ large in chimpanzee society. Good Natured makes the point with the help of
a profusion of gripping examples."
--Stephen Young, BBC Wildlife
"As a book of ideas...this is excellent and on the whole I am inclined to believe de Waal's case for the
antecedents of our own morality in other species, Perhaps most interestingly, however, is that the domain hitherto
of philosophers is now being contested by evolutionary biologists. Not only does this tighten up the terms of the
debate (as did ape language research for linguistics), but ironically it injects a special kind of humanism that
recognises the origins of our moral failings as well as our successes."
--Thomas Sambrook, Times Higher Education Supplement
"[A] well-written, provocative book."
--Charles T. Snowdon, Science
Table of Contents
Prologue
Darwinian Dilemmas
Survival of the Unfittest
Biologicizing Morality
Calvinist Sociobiology
A Broader View
The Invisible Grasping Organ
Ethology and Ethics Photo Essay: Closeness
Sympathy
Warm Blood in Cold Waters
Special Treatment of the Handicapped
Responses to Injury and Death
Having Broad Nails
The Social Mirror
Lying and Aping Apes
Simian Sympathy
A World without Compassion Photo Essay: Cognition and Empathy
Rank and Order
A Sense of Social Regularity
The Monkey's Behind
Guilt and Shame
Unruly Youngsters
The Blushing Primate
Two Genders, Two Moralities?
Umbilical versus Confrontational Bonds
Primus inter Pares
Quid pro Quo
The Less-than-Golden Rule
Mobile Meals
At the Circle's Center
A Concept of Giving
Testing for Reciprocity
From Revenge to Justice Photo Essay: Help from a Friend
Getting Along
The Social Cage
The Relational Model
Peacemaking
Rope Walking
Baboon Testimony
Draining the Behavioral Sink
Community Concern Photo Essay: War and Peace
Conclusion
What Does It Take to Be Moral?
Floating Pyramids
A Hole in the Head
