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Good morning. Trinity College, Dublin – Ireland’s oldest university – has become the latest institution in a long list, including my own university, Cambridge – to launch an enquiry into its links with slavery. Symbolically, the case of one of Trinity College Dublin’s most intellectually distinguished alumni, the philosopher George Berkeley, is rather telling. Berkeley - whose name has been given to Trinity’s library, and indeed to a very distinguished University in the United States - was himself briefly a slave owner. Pursuing an ill-fated venture to establish a training college in the colonies, he spent nearly four years in Rhode Island and purchased slaves to work his plantation. He was, to boot, an Anglican clergyman and later a Bishop – and as far as we know, his conscience was not in the least troubled by the buying and selling of human chattels. Discussions about historical links with slavery seem to get quite ill-tempered quite quickly – it is a popular site for a spat in the so-called culture wars. But I wonder whether the generation here of an excess of heat over light has to do with our confusing two different issues – reckoning with the past and reckoning with the present. Reckoning with the past should surely chiefly mean trying to understand the entanglement of the economies of the last three hundred years or more with slavery; but it need entail no ‘holier than thou’ attitude towards our forebears. George Berkeley’s view that a good Christian could own slaves was very widely held and only very rarely challenged until the end of the eighteenth century. Berkeley may have been a phenomenally clever mathematician, but he was a very average moralist – and I am inclined to think that declaring him a goodie or a baddie is a contentious distraction. Far more important is a moral question we ought to be asking about the present: how should we come to terms with the dependence of the West’s affluence on its inheritance of riches generated by slave produced cotton, tobacco and sugar? The proposals of Zacchaeus in the New Testament provide one answer to that question. When Zacchaeus, the diminutive chief tax collector, came down from the tree he had climbed to get a better view of Jesus, and had welcomed him to his house, he summarily announces ‘Behold, half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay it back four times over.’ Of course, any proposal for reparations must finally face some hard practical questions about who owes what to whom. But insofar as we fail to face up to the question of reparations honestly and imaginatively, it is the present and not the past which is morally questionable.