 The gradual abandonment of the medieval usury laws in the West is typically attributed to a growing acknowledgment of the great potential for economic growth unleashed by easy access to capital. One could perhaps say that history itself disproved Aristotle: money indeed proved to have a productive use. In a short text from 1787, Bentham famously poked fun at many of the classical anti-usury arguments and defended the practice of charging interest from a utilitarian standpoint (Bentham 1787). However, this does not mean that worries about the ethics of charging interest, and allegations of usury, have disappeared entirely in society. As noted above, usury today means charging interest rates that seem excessive or exorbitant. For instance, many people are outraged by the rates charged on modern payday loans, or the way in which rich countries exact interest on their loans from poor countries (Baradaran 2015, Graeber 2011, Herzog 2017a). These intuitions have clear affinities with the justice-based arguments outlined above.