Ethics and Evolutionary Continuity: Comments on De Waal, Lyons, Moran, and Kraemer

Coming to understand ourselves as existing in evolutionary continuity with the rest of the living world is critical to a reexamination of our relationship with the other animals. Frans de Waal’s latest book is of great importance in contributing to the transfer of ethical behavior—in addition to tool use, “language” ability, “self-awareness,” and other such traits—out of the realm of supposed markers for “human uniqueness” and into the arena for examination as characteristics developed to differing degrees in many lifeforms through the process of natural selection. Identifying his work as a part of the growing, interdisciplinary field of cognitive ethology, de Waal makes no apologies for considering nonhuman animals as “knowing, wanting, and calculating beings.” While a good Darwinist, he looks askance at the proclivity of proponents of “gene-centric sociobiology” to exploit the vernacular connotations of selfishness even as they speak technically of “selfish genes” and to emphasize competition, aggression and the negative aspects of animal behavior over cooperation, reconciliation and positive actions taken by individual animals, as noted by Lyons. Most of de Waal’s work has been with captive primates, from his landmark study of the chimpanzee colony at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, documented in his earlier books Chimpanzee Politics and Peacemaking in Primates, to his observations of rhesus and stumptailed macaques at the Wisconsin Primate Center and bonobos at the San Diego Zoo and his ongoing research at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta. As one who has spent thousands of hours in face-to-face encounters with these nonhuman others, he has a lived awareness of and respect for their individuality in all its concreteness. This allows him to get beyond mere armchair abstraction and the insidious if inadvertent anthropocentrism of those who know no other than the human world. It also impels him to express concern about our treatment of nonhuman animals, both in captivity and in the wild. In Good Natured, de Waal makes a case for “the origins of ethics” in the behavior of nonhuman animals on the basis of his own and others’ observations, as they can be fit within the paradigm of Darwinian thinking.