Weboeconomia, The Œconomia Book Review Online, April 2011 Cyril Hédoin, Review of: The Structural Evolution of Morality, by McKenzie Alexander 1 The Structural Evolution of Morality McKenzie Alexander By : Cyril Hédoin Université de Reims Champagne Ardennes [posted April 2011] Review of: The Structural Evolution of Morality, McKenzie Alexander, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2008, 312 pages, ISBN : 978-0521870320 J. McKenzie Alexander's The Structural Evolution of Morality falls within the scope of the growing evolutionary literature about morality and justice. As the title of the book clearly indicates, the author (a philosopher currently based at the London School of Economics) intends to give an evolutionary explanation of our moral behavior with the use of the most recent tools of evolutionary modeling. J.M. Alexander’s book asks several interesting questions, both methodological and substantive, that apply to the more general “evolutionary generalism” research program. Rather than providing a detailed summary of the book, we will focus on a methodological issue, namely: Are highly abstract evolutionary models relevant for explaining fairness principles and moral behavior? Alexander's book is made of seven chapters, two of them (the first and the last) being methodological and philosophical. The five other chapters present several evolutionary models of different basic moral behaviors: cooperation, trust, fairness and retribution. The main thesis is stated in the very first lines of the book: “The central claim of this book is that morality provides a set of heuristics that, when followed, serves to produce the best expected outcome, for each of us, over the course of our lives, given the constraints placed by other people” (p. vii). The book argues that morality stems from the actions of boundedly rational individuals. Despite the fact that individuals do not have the cognitive ability to reach the best outcome both in parametric and strategic situations, actually it appears that they are able to coordinate on near-optimal outcomes. The author presents morality as the main device for allowing some kind of “ecological rationality”.