Product Description

"It's the animal in us," we often hear when we've been bad. But why not when we're good? Primates and Philosophers tackles this question by exploring the biological foundations of one of humanity's most valued traits: morality.

In this provocative book, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that modern-day evolutionary biology takes far too dim a view of the natural world, emphasizing our "selfish" genes. Science has thus exacerbated our reciprocal habits of blaming nature when we act badly and labeling the good things we do as "humane." Seeking the origin of human morality not in evolution but in human culture, science insists that we are moral by choice, not by nature.

Citing remarkable evidence based on his extensive research of primate behavior, de Waal attacks "Veneer Theory," which posits morality as a thin overlay on an otherwise nasty nature. He explains how we evolved from a long line of animals that care for the weak and build cooperation with reciprocal transactions. Drawing on both Darwin and recent scientific advances, de Waal demonstrates a strong continuity between human and animal behavior. In the process, he also probes issues such as anthropomorphism and human responsibilities toward animals.

Based on the Tanner Lectures de Waal delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 2004, Primates and Philosophers includes responses by the philosophers Peter Singer, Christine M. Korsgaard, and Philip Kitcher and the science writer Robert Wright. They press de Waal to clarify the differences between humans and other animals, yielding a lively debate that will fascinate all those who wonder about the origins and reach of human goodness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49171 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 230 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Celebrated primatologist de Waal expands on his earlier work in Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals to argue that human traits of fairness, reciprocity and altruism develop through natural selection. Based on his 2004 Tanner Lectures at Princeton, this book argues that our morality grows out of the social instincts we share with bonobos, chimpanzees and apes. De Waal criticizes what he calls the "veneer theory," which holds that human ethics is simply an overlay masking our "selfish and brutish nature." De Waal draws on his own work with primates to illustrate the evolution of morality. For example, chimpanzees are more favorably disposed to others who have performed a service for them (such as grooming) and more likely to share their food with these individuals. In three appendixes, de Waal ranges briefly over anthropomorphism, apes and a theory of mind, and animal rights. The volume also includes responses to de Waal by Robert Wright, Christine M. Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher and Peter Singer. Although E.O. Wilson and Robert Wright have long contended that altruism is a product of evolution, de Waal demonstrates through his empirical work with primates the evolutionary basis for ethics. (Oct.)
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From Scientific American
It was not until a year and a half after his voyage on board the Beagle that Charles Darwin first came face to face with an ape. He was standing by the giraffe house at the London Zoo on a warm day in late March of 1838. The zoo had just acquired an orangutan named Jenny. One of the keepers was teasing her—showing her an apple, refusing to hand it over. Poor Jenny "threw herself on her back, kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child," Darwin wrote in a letter to his sister. In the secret notebooks that he kept after the voyage, Darwin was speculating about evolution from every angle, including the emotional, and he was fascinated by Jenny’s tantrum. What is it like to be an ape? Does an orangutan’s frustration feel a lot like ours? Might she cherish some sense of right and wrong? Will an ape despair because her keeper is breaking the rules—because he is just not playing fair? Our own species has been talking, volubly and passionately, for at least 50,000 years, and it’s a fair guess that arguments about right and wrong were prominent in our conversation pretty much from the beginning. We started writing things down 5,000 years ago, and some of our first texts were codes of ethics. Our innumerable volumes of scripture and law, our Departments of Justice, High Courts, Low Courts, and Courts of Common Pleas are unique in the living world. But did we human beings invent our feeling for justice, or is it part of the package of primal emotions that we inherited from our ancestors? In other words: Did morality evolve? Dutch-born psychologist, ethologist and primatologist Frans de Waal has spent his career watching the behavior of apes and monkeys, mostly captive troupes in zoos. As a young student, he sat on a wooden stool day after day for six years, observing a colony of chimpanzees at the Arnhem Zoo. Today he watches chimpanzees from an observation post at Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta and at other zoos and primate centers. His work, along with primatologist Jane Goodall’s, has helped lift Darwin’s conjectures about the evolution of morality to a new level. He has documented tens of thousands of instances of chimpanzee behavior that among ourselves we would call Machiavellian and about as many moments that we would call altruistic, even noble. In his scientific papers and popular books (including Chimpanzee Politics, Our Inner Ape and Good Natured), he argues that Darwin was correct from that first glimpse of Jenny at the zoo. Sympathy, empathy, right and wrong are feelings that we share with other animals; even the best part of human nature, the part that cares about ethics and justice, is also part of nature. De Waal’s latest book, Primates and Philosophers, is based on the Tanner Lectures that he delivered at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values in 2004. In this book he tries—as he has many times before—to refute a popular caricature of Darwinism. Many people assume that to be good, be nice, behave, play well with others, we have to rise above our animal nature. It’s a dog-eat dog world out there—or, as the Romans put it, homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man (a curious proverb for a people whose founding myth was the suckling by a wolf of the infant twins Romulus and Remus). Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s self-appointed bulldog, promoted this dark, cold view of life in a famous lecture, Evolution and Ethics. "The ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it," he declared. In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan puts it another way: if there is no God, then we are lost in a moral chaos. "Everything is permitted." De Waal calls this "Veneer Theory." In this view, human morality is a thin crust on a churning urn of boiling funk. In reality, de Waal reminds us, dogs are social, wolves are social, chimps and macaques are social, and we ourselves are "social to the core." Goodness, generosity and genuine kindness come just as naturally to us as meaner feelings. We didn’t have to invent compassion. When our ancestors began writing down the first codes of conduct, precepts, laws and commandments, they were elaborating on feelings that evolved thousands or even millions of years before they were born. "Instead of empathy being an endpoint," de Waal writes, "it may have been the starting point." Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when animal psychologists talked about "sympathy" and "empathy," they always put those words between quotation marks, de Waal notes. Now he wants to take away the quotation marks. He describes one of his best-known demonstrations that animals care about fairness. In the experiment, he had pairs of capuchin monkeys perform simple tasks in their cages. For successfully completing each task they would get a reward, sometimes a slice of cucumber, sometimes a grape. All the monkeys would work for and eat the cucumber slices, but they preferred grapes. If one monkey kept getting paid in cucumber and it could see that its partner in the next cage was getting grapes, it would get mad, like Darwin’s Jenny. After a while the monkey would refuse to eat or throw the cucumber right out of the cage. Is de Waal right about all this? In the second half of Primates and Philosophers, his arguments are critiqued by a series of commentators, all of whom have written important studies of evolutionary ethics. They cite Freud, Kant, Hume, Nietzsche and Adam Smith. They circle and circle around those pairs of capuchin monkeys: "A capuchin rejects a cucumber when her partner is offered a grape—is she protesting the unfairness, or is she just holding out for a grape?" writes Christine M. Korsgaard, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. "Of course, if the lucky capuchin were to throw down the grape until his comrade had a similar reward, that would be very interesting!" writes Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. They disagree, they discuss, they bicker a little, like all primates and philosophers. They illuminate not only ageless questions of ethics but also current concerns such as the Geneva convention and "why universal empathy is such a fragile proposal," as de Waal writes in his response to his critics. By the end of the book it seems clear that we can no longer look at morality as a sort of civilized veneer on a cold and selfish animal, even though that view goes back long before Darwin went to the zoo. Its origin lies in the Western concept of original sin—when Adam and Eve ate their first apple.

Jonathan Weiner won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Beak of the Finch. He teaches science writing in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

From Booklist
Primatologist de Waal's career has been devoted to demonstrating that nature isn't utterly red in tooth and claw. His Tanner Lectures in Human Values argue that for the great apes and humans, in particular, morality isn't a veneer masking self-interest. It is intrinsic, the evolutionary outcome of the fact that altruism is conducive to species survival. Darwin, who saw no "conflict between the harshness of the evolutionary process and the gentleness of some of its products" and who affirmed the developmental similarity of species, including humans, essentially held the same position, de Waal says, being influenced toward it by Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith. There is more to de Waal's exceptionally rich but always lucid paper, notably including an appendix, one of three, on animal rights. Four philosophers--one the controversial ethicist and advocate for animals Peter Singer--critique aspects of de Waal's argument, and in conclusion, de Waal responds to them. Intellectual soul food for biology-minded ethicists, in particular. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

I loved this book!!
The format is a series of essays, the first by de Waal, then commentary, and then at the end his reply. Very interesting. Made me feel like I was back in College! Philosopy, anthropology, socialogy and psychology all rolled into one, plus morality and ethics--- all the good stuff!! Ties in with Dawkins' the God Delusion.I even sent a copy to my dad.:)

Frans the Wise
If you have never read anything by Frans de Waal, this is probably not the best book to start with. I would try Good Natured or Chimpanzee Politics, or even Our Inner Ape. This short book is really an overview of de Waal's views on primate morality, without the rich description of primate life offered in his earlier books, followed by commentaries by four well-known philosophers. The philosopher's comments are mildly interesting but forgettable, except for Peter Singer's defense of Kantian ethics, which is interesting and revealing of Singer's own take on morality.

De Waal is the star of this show, and he delves more deeply than ever before on the relationship between the quasi-moral behavior of non-human primates and the moral behavior of humans. De Waal has some very interesting things to say about human morality, and generally comes off as being wise and self-confident in his treatment of the sociobiology of morality.

"The moral domain of action," says de Waal, "is Helping or (not) Hurting others...Anything unrelated to the two H's fall outside of morality. Those who invoke morality in reference to, say, same sex marriage or the visibility of a naked [...] on prime time television are merely trying to couch social conventions in moral language." (p. 162) This statement is wildly incorrect, but incorrect in an interesting way. We know that social conventions take on moral weight with great regularity in all societies. How you pray, how you copulate, what you eat and wear, all become grist for the moralist's mill. Why is that? De Waal does not say. At any rate, this aspect of human morality appears to have little echo in the lives of non-human primates.

Because de Waal believes that Helping and (not) Hurting is the true subject of morality, he locates the pre-human roots of morality in empathy and sympathy, thus siding with David Hume and Adam Smith, and against Kant, who finds the roots of morality in Reason. There is little doubt but that apes have some significant endowment of capacity for sympathy, and that sympathy is an ineluctable part of human morality. This fact alone is strong support for de Waal's argument.

I venture, however, that there are other roots of human morality in the animal world. One of these is the respect for private property, which is exhibited in many animals as territoriality and in the great apes as respect for a "personal sphere of control" over valuable resources. The interested reader can refer to Herbert Gintis, "The Evolution of Private Property", Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 64,1 [sep] (2007):1-16, where the biological basis for such respect takes the form of loss aversion. Needless to say, by "private property" I do not mean private property in the legal sense, but rather the personal sense that individuals have a private sphere in which their will is law, and this sphere is intimately related to having "personal possessions" that are respected by others as a matter of course.

De Waal does not say what forms of human morality are not legacies of, or continuations of, the characteristics of the great apes. I suggest the following, which are therefore virtually exclusively human.

First is the notion of a "character virtue," such as honesty, bravery, piety, considerateness, trustworthiness, cleanliness, and the like. These are supremely moral virtues and although they generally promote prosocial ends, they are not Helping or Hurting, and do not depend on empathy or sympathy. I am honest because it is the right way to be, not because I care about other people.

Second is the notion that there are social norms, and it is right and good that individuals follow these norms, and it is right and good that we punish people who violate these norms, even when it is costly to do so. The notion that we "obey the rules" of society even when it is costly to do so, and even if we can profit by violating these norms, is a distinctly human form of morality. It also accounts for why humans treat social conventions (e.g., what forms of food and clothing are permissible, who is allowed to marry whom) as within the realm of the moral, although they may be arbitrary from the point of view of Helping and Hurting.

Wonderful read; very well written.
This book was lent to me by a friend, and after reading I felt it necessary to purchase my own copy. I would have never made this choice, this text is completely outside my normal reading genres, but I'm very glad I did. Frans de Waal provides and extremely well written thesis on his views of morality in humans, his views are then analyzed by others, and closes with his response. I haven't read his other text Good Natured, but intend to do so.
It is important to note that I am in no way highly educated in the fields of primatology, anthropology, or philosophy; my background is in math and computer science; so I came to this book with a certain ignorance.