Postwar Camus held absolute pacifist principles while Sartre and Beauvoir embraced consequentialist reasoning

Evidence

After his bolder and more effective Resistance activity at Combat and elsewhere, Camus now drew clearer lines: he opposed execution, torture and other state abuses, and that was that. Beauvoir and Sartre were not exactly in favour of such things, but they liked to point to complex political realities and means-ends calculations. They would ask whether there really could be cases where harm by the state could be justifiable. What if something very great is at stake, and the future of a vast number of people requires some remorseless act? Camus just kept returning to his core principle: no torture, no killing — at least not with state approval. Beauvoir and Sartre believed they were taking a more subtle and more realistic view. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 524

Categorization

• XREF: This absolute-vs-consequentialist split prefigures later continental debates over political violence and echoes in Sartre’s eventual defense of revolutionary terror.