Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals

BBC Wildlife

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

Boston Globe

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

Los Angeles Times

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

New Scientist (UK)

[Good Natured] is a tour de force and a landmark in the growing field of cognitive ethology....[It] is an example of the very best in popular science writing. De Waal skilfully weaves together anecdotes, theories and data to create a text that is thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.
— Gail Vines

New York Times Book Review

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

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

A large and entertaining collection of anecdotes about animal behaviour. These are used to bolster the proposition that mental processes governing complex forms of human behaviour, such as sympathy and empathy with others, must have their homologues in the animal kingdom...[This book] is extremely well written and very entertaining.
— Alan Dixson

Science

[A] well-written, provocative book.
— Charles T. Snowdon

Scientific American

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

Times Higher Education Supplement

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

Village Voice Literary Supplement

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

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

Since moral systems are universal among humans, de Waal considers this tendency to be an integral part of human nature—biologically significant, rather than a cultural counterforce. Yet from the standpoint of evolutionary biology, whence came such moral attributes as self-sacrifice and communal interests, dubious traits in the Darwinian scheme (but only when Darwin is narrowly interpreted, as de Waal notes)? And since the moral ingredients of sympathy, reciprocity, and peacemaking are found scattered throughout the animal kingdom, what is their evolutionary advantage? De Waal isn't looking for proofs—at this stage of research there aren't any. He's more interested in cross- pollinating his delicious array of intuitions, anecdotes, and random observations, with theories from neurobiology, visual anthropology, comparative psychology, evolutionary science, and cognitive ethology (his command of the fields that touch upon the biological roots of morality is dazzling; the guy did his homework, then went for the extra credit). Two theories in particular give some beef to his hunch that animals have a moral faculty: kin selection (in which the genetic imperative is satisfied even at one's own expense) and reciprocal altruism (immediate costs balanced by long-term benefits). The greatest truth emerging from juxtaposing genetic self-interest with intense sociality, de Waal figures, is that human and beast are both noble and brutish, both nurtured and natured.

Unpretentious, open, humorous, and with a flair for language, de Waal nimbly displays that rare and wonderful scientific mind: as much at home with contradiction, clutter, and illogic as with systematic data.