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ETHICS to unforeseen loss to the lender (given the technical name damnum emergens) This was seen as compensation for damage inXicted, rather than interest on the loan itself But this minor relaxation of the prohibition led, over the next century, to its total emasculation at the hands of the casuists The Wrst step was the introduction of the notion of opportunity cost One of the things one gives up when making a loan is the possibility of making proWt from an alternative use of the money So damnum emergens is joined by lucrum cessans (cessation of gain) as a title to reimbursement The expansion of capitalism during the sixteenth century multiplied the opportunities for alternative investment, and so casuists were able to argue that in almost every case there would be present one or other of these justiWcations for charging interest The casuists’ logic was surely, on their own terms, very dubious The money which I lend you I could indeed put to other uses: I could lend it to someone else, or I could invest it in a partnership But on the Wrst supposition, the only gain I am losing by lending to you is a gain which would itself be unlawful, namely, the taking of usury And on the second supposition, it is not at all sure that I am losing anything by making you the loan My alternative venture might go wrong and so far from making a proWt, I would lose my capital as well You may turn out to have been doing me a good turn by borrowing from me Nonetheless, casuists, some of them hired as consultants by the major banking houses, came out with ever more complicated schemes to circumvent the prohibition on usury The Duke of Bavaria, in whose dominions such schemes were highly popular, proposed the following case for consideration by a commission of Jesuits in 1580 It is worth quoting in its own terms, for it is framed in the typical format of a ‘case of conscience’: Titius, a German, loans Sympronius a sum of money Sympronius is a person of means, and the money is lent to him for no speciWc purpose The conditions are that Titius is to receive annually Wve Xorins for every hundred lent, and afterwards have the whole capital back There is no danger to the capital, and Titius must get his 5%, whether or not Sympronius makes a proWt.5 The question proposed was: is this contract lawful? The commissioners returned a highly qualiWed reply, but on its basis the Jesuit order declared Quoted by Jonsen and Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p, 189 250
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