Private Vices are public virtues, so says Mandeville in the Fable of the Bees. No, David Hume argues, the frame is wrong. Strong boundaries of vice and virtue cannot be drawn in consumer behavior.
This is our introduction to the problem of leaving medieval morality behind us. The Church did not place the economic advancement of the poor high up the list of concerns and even saw it as a great danger. How did we ever escape this kind of thinking?