People will always do violent things, but philosophers and state officials have a duty not to come up with excuses that will justify them. His opinion made him controversial. In 1957, at a talk to mark his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, Camus was asked to explain his failure to support the rebels. He said, ‘People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.’ For Camus there could be no objective justification for either side’s actions, so his own loyalties were the only possible source of
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