What if They are all hostile? As i am lacking any friendly goblins to test with...
If you can't find merchants, abandoning your fortress with hostiles on it will make them friendly. (I abandoned mine because my beautiful above ground bubble was "infiltrated" - I accidentally left a staircase leading right inside my fortress, past ALL of my defencess. :d).
Really wierd thing to note here, is when I got a friendly whippy gobby and a hostile gobby crossbowman within the vicinity of each other, good 'ol Whippy came out unscathed and victorious, holding the corpse of the crossbowman. Then another unusual thing occured - Another friendly gobby maceman charged at whippy, and killed the death out of him.
This suggests goblins are also extremely volatile creatures with a hightened sense of emotions - It would make comeplete sense!
Their paternal and maternal instincts would be so severe that they would arm themselves and steal children from fortresses where such a thing is practically a death sentence.
They torture for fun, are naturally cruel, yet they uphold their fortress's honour through sieges that ultimately cause their doom, kill traitor goblins, even when they themselves have defected, and it would also mean after comepletely killing every soul in a fortress, and gazing at the empty broken towns full of beautiful engravings, that they would feal so sorrowful as to defend that site with their lives, guilt hightened to an almost soul breaking level.
Looks like the philosophies continue.
As does the !!SCIENCE!!.