When Is Violence Justified?
WHEN IS VIOLENCE JUSTIFIED? BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS In the end only the urge for self-preservation can conquer.... Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish." Adolf Hitler Albert Camus, philosophy student and novel writer, worked with the French Resistance during the war. We are therefore not surprised by his keen interest in violence, in suicide, murder, rebellion, revolution, war, or by his struggle to answer the question, When, if ever, is violence justified? Camus was an atheist. God is deaf to our pleas simply because no personal god exists to hear them. Neither is Nature or the world a person: the natural world is surd or deaf to man; the world does not care one way or another for humankind, wherefore the relationship between man and world is absurd. But that is not to say that life is meaningless or that the world is not worth living in. Man is on his own and must decide what to do with his life. Man is a moral creatur...