We name buildings after people, or put up statues to them, because we respect them. But what if we then discover they did wrong? In what cases should the building be renamed, or the statue be removed, asks the AFP's in-house philosopher, David Edmonds. It's been described as "the loveliest room in Europe". Gothic on the outside, classical on the inside, it's a cathedral but not for the gods. It's a cathedral for the worship of books. The Codrington Library in All Soul's College is one of Oxford University's hidden architectural gems. It's also got a back story, and one rather embarrassing for the College. Inside the library is a magnificent marble statue of the former All Souls Fellow after whom it is named, Christopher Codrington. Codrington died in 1710. His will was found, so we're told, in his boots. A fortune - £10,000 - was bequeathed to All Souls for the books and the building. And the source of all this money? Well, Codrington was descended from a line of sugar magnates. Their plantations were in Barbados and Antigua - and they were worked by slaves. All around the world, institutions are dealing with a conundrum. What to do about statues or buildings or scholarships or awards, honouring or funded by people we now regard as seriously morally flawed? It's causing tensions from Princeton to Cape Town to Sydney. You don't have to walk far from All Souls College to find another illustration of the dilemma - it takes just one minute, in fact. Oriel College has become one focus of the Rhodes Must Fall movement. Some students have objected to the statue of Cecil Rhodes - it's inappropriate, they say, to have a statue of this 19th Century businessman, an advocate of white supremacy whose life was so deeply enmeshed with British imperialism. Despite a vociferous campaign to have the statue removed, the College announced early in 2016 that Rhodes will not fall (a decision no doubt influenced by threats from potential donors that if it were pulled down or relocated, they would withdraw their bequests). According to Daniel Butt, a politics fellow at Balliol College, arguments about whether to pull down or move once revered figures - like Rhodes - inevitably provoke powerful emotions. "We want to have positive views of our ancestors, we want to think we come from a moral community, that people who came before us were good people - and also that we're good people," he says. "We react very strongly to the idea that just by living somewhere or having a certain identity we're linked to historical injustice or present-day wrongdoing." Oxford attracts millions of tourists a year. Few of them will be aware that everywhere you look in the city you can find links with Britain's colonial past. Balliol College, where Daniel Butt teaches, is no exception. In the late 19th Century it educated many of those who went on to administer the Empire, including three successive viceroys of India (Lansdowne, Elgin and Curzon). How then should we deal with discomforting reminders of the past? One approach is to do nothing. The do-nothing advocates say history shouldn't be rewritten. To do so would be a form of censorship. And, they say, it's ridiculous to expect every great historical figure to be blemish-free, to have lived a life of unadulterated purity. Even those held up as saintly figures, such as Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, had flaws (Gandhi's attitude to women is excruciating, seen through 21st Century eyes).