Abstract
For the moralist philosophers of the eighteenth century, if man is certainly a product of nature, he is also progressively moulded by social life. Therefore, for those philosophers, the social is a constitutive social in which the intentions and purposes of persons are not given in advance of their entry in the social relations. It is this meaning of the social that we propose here to redicover through Hume’s distinction of natural and artificial virtues and the illustration of a solution to the prisoner dilemma in terms of moral sentiments.
Classification JEL : B3, C72.