Usury -- the practice of lending money at interest -- occupies an unusual place as a historical phenomenon: it is a practice that is condemned in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions (to greater and lesser degrees), but forms the foundational bedrock of modern capitalist societies. Is there any other practice about which this can be said?
...
Just to be specific: I am not asking about practices condemned by (all of) these traditions but now tolerated, or even celebrated, by some or many today. To stand in the same position as usury, the practice would have to have been universally condemned, and also constitute an indisputable, core feature of our contemporary social makeup -- something foundational and taken for granted by people with very different moral outlooks.
I'm not convinced usury itself meets that standard. David Palm observes that:
On what specific principles is interest-taking moral or immoral? This was at the heart of the question of usury. Eventually the morality of interest-taking came to be understood as intrinsically bound up in the nature of the thing lent and the impact (or lack thereof) on the person lending it. It is immoral to take interest on the loan of a thing that is completely consumed by its use, for which one has no other use, and for which one incurs no loss by lending it. ...
... it became clear that money in more modern economies—with competitive markets and almost unlimited opportunities for profitable ("fruitful") investment—did not suffer from the same tendency to be "unfruitful" as it had before. In the face of this change, the Church defined what is meant by usury. Session X of the Fifth Lateran Council (1515) gave its exact meaning: "For that is the real meaning of usury: when, from its use, a thing which produces nothing is applied to the acquiring of gain and profit without any work, any expense or any risk."
... Rickaby sums up the correct view of usury nicely: "[I]t is usury to take any interest at all upon the loan of a piece of property, which (a) is of no use except to be used up, spent, consumed; (b) is not wanted for the lender's own consumption within the period of the load; (c) is lent upon security that obviates risk; (d) is so lent that the lender forgoes no occasion of lawful gain by lending it" (Rickaby, 258).
... A loan that was usurious at one point in history, due to the unfruitfulness of money, is not usurious later, when the development of competitive markets has changed the nature of money itself. But this is not a change of the Church's teaching on usury. Today nearly all commercial transactions, including monetary loans at interest, do not qualify as usury. This constitutes a change only in the nature of the financial transaction itself, not in the teaching of the Church on usury. "Still she maintains dogmatically that there is such a sin as usury, and what it is, as defined in the Fifth Council of Lateran "(ibid., 263).
If it is correct that "nearly all commercial transactions, including monetary loans at interest, do not qualify as usury," then usury is not "an indisputable, core feature of our contemporary social makeup."
Part of the problem, of course, is definitional. In a well-known book, Judge John Noonan argued that "usury is the taking of any interest on any sort of loan," which seems to be DeGirolami's position, as well. As Palm observes, however, "Noonan passes over in silence the parts of Scripture that indicate that interest-taking is not inherently immoral." Usury thus is not the "taking of any interest on any sort of loan," as confirmed by the Scripture passages DeGirolami himself quotes.
The difficulty is that DeGirolami takes those passages as suggesting a less than universal prohibition of usury. In contrast, following Palm (and I think Catholic teaching), I regard them as definitional. You can have interest-bearing loans that are non-usurious.
