The Camus Trolley Problem Meme Explained: Sisyphus, Foot and the Car Camus Died In

Last updated: October 21, 2026

The Camus trolley problem meme puts Albert Camus at the switch of a trolley problem and borrows the first line of his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), which in Justin O’Brien’s translation reads: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” The trolley problem itself comes from a 1967 paper by the Oxford philosopher Philippa Foot, published in the Oxford Review, and the vehicle on the track is the joke’s darkest layer: Camus died on 4 January 1960, aged 46, when the Facel Vega driven by his publisher Michel Gallimard left the road near Villeblevin, south-east of Paris, as reported by The New European. Camus had been dead for seven years when Foot’s runaway tram appeared in print.

The meme is a classic trolley-problem drawing with Camus’ photographed head on the stick figure at the lever, cigarette in mouth. Instead of a trolley, a dark-blue late-1950s coupé, the meme’s stand-in for the Facel Vega, rolls towards the junction with a small TPS logo on its grille. Nobody is tied to the tracks. Camus is standing on the one the car is heading down. The caption reads “There’s only one serious philosophical trolley problem …”, which turns his question about whether life is worth living into a choice of track.

The First Line of The Myth of Sisyphus

Camus opens The Myth of Sisyphus by declaring suicide the one serious philosophical problem, because every other question, he argues, comes after deciding whether life is worth living.

The full opening, in O’Brien’s 1955 translation, adds that judging whether life is worth living “amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy”. Translations differ: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy renders it as the one “really serious philosophical question”, which is why both versions circulate in memes. Camus was 28 when the essay came out in occupied France, and the question he poses is diagnostic: what follows once you accept that the world does not answer the human demand for meaning. That clash, between our need for reasons and a universe that gives none, is what he calls the absurd. The line gets misattributed to existentialism in general, though Camus, according to the SEP, denied being an existentialist, and The Myth of Sisyphus was written against existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Heidegger. Under the drama sits a practical question: what does someone who has seen through every grand explanation do on Monday morning?

Two Exits, Both Refused

Camus considers two ways out of the absurd, killing yourself and the leap of faith he calls philosophical suicide, and rejects both.

Physical suicide fails, in his argument, because it settles the conflict by abolishing one side of it, the person who feels it. “In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing”, he writes: confessing that life was too much and that the absurd won. This is Camus testing an argument about the absurd, and it is no verdict on people in crisis.

The second exit is subtler. Thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers and Lev Shestov, in the SEP’s account, look the absurd in the face and then jump to God or transcendence, and Camus charges that they “deify what crushes them”. He puts both moves in one sentence: “Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme.” What remains is revolt, a lucid refusal to make peace with the absurd while living as fully as possible inside it. Its mascot arrives in the last chapter, and the essay’s final words are “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” We take that line apart in Is Sisyphus truly happy?, and the difference between Camus and the existentialists gets its own post in Is absurdism just existentialism with good vibes?

Read with this in mind, the caption turns Camus’ opening question into a switch: he is standing on one track while the car comes down it. A trolley problem demands that you pick a track. Camus’ essay answers the question it asks here: he does not step off the world, and he does not jump to a heaven either. He stays, lucid, which in the meme means a hand on the lever and both eyes on the car.

If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, free and confidential support is available in your country via Find A Helpline.

A Runaway Tram in a Paper About Abortion

The trolley problem was invented by Philippa Foot in 1967 as a test case in an argument about abortion and the doctrine of double effect, and Judith Jarvis Thomson gave it its name in 1976.

Foot’s paper, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect”, appeared in the Oxford Review in 1967. Her tram has a driver, not a bystander: he can only steer from one track to another, killing one person instead of five. What Foot wanted to know was why the driver may steer into one person when a judge may not frame and execute one innocent man to stop a riot that would kill five, a pairing the SEP entry on doing and allowing sets out (citing the essay’s 1978 reprint), and, as Britannica summarises, she argued that negative duties not to harm weigh more than positive duties to help.

Thomson coined the name in the title of her 1976 paper “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem” in The Monist, listed in the SEP entry on double effect, and Cass Sunstein conceded in the New York Review of Books that it was “Thomson, and not Foot, who named the Trolley Problem”. Her 1985 paper moved the decision to a bystander at the switch. In 2008 she changed her mind and argued that the bystander should not turn the trolley after all, a reversal recorded in the same SEP entry. Our post on utilitarianism shows why the case keeps embarrassing theories that count only outcomes.

The common complaint that the trolley problem is a false binary misses what Foot was doing. Thought experiments strip away detail on purpose, the way a lab experiment holds every variable fixed but one, so that a single moral principle can be tested. The fair version of the complaint concerns how the case gets used: a case built to isolate one variable tells you little about how to run a hospital, a war or a city, and it gets quoted as if it did.

How the Trolley Became the Internet’s Favourite Philosophy Joke

Trolley problem memes moved from niche boards such as 4chan’s literature section to mass social media around 2016, and they work because the setup is already absurd before anyone adds a joke.

Know Your Meme traces the familiar line drawing to the philosopher Jesse Prinz, who posted it on subcortex.com some time before 2009, and dates the first known edit on 4chan’s literature board to 29 November 2013, when the people on the tracks were given the faces of Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler. By December 2016, Clio Chang reported in The New Republic that the Facebook page Trolley Problem Memes had collected “over 170,000 likes” within the year, and that “multi-track drifting” had become the group’s standing inside joke.

The phrase comes from a 2004 fan-comic parody of the street-racing manga Initial D in which a train drifts across two tracks, and, as Know Your Meme explains, in trolley memes it offers the option of running over both groups at once. Chang quoted the writer Brian Feldman, who located the humour in “the scenario itself” rather than in anyone’s answer. Swap the people on the tracks, add a third line or hand the lever to a nihilist, and the format keeps working, because the original choice was grotesque to begin with.

The dilemma also left the seminar room for real. The Moral Machine experiment, published in Nature in 2018, gathered 40 million decisions from people in 233 countries and territories about whom a self-driving car should hit. Edmond Awad and his colleagues found three broad clusters of countries whose preferences differed, and the differences correlated with institutions and deep cultural traits.

Camus at the Lever

Camus never wrote about trolleys, but his political essays reject the reasoning the switch case invites: trading lives by arithmetic for a better result.

In “Neither Victims nor Executioners”, a 1946 newspaper series written in reply to attacks from the Communist press, Camus rejected the principle that the end justifies the means, according to the SEP. The Rebel (1951) pushes the point further. Revolt, for Camus, begins as a protest against suffering and death, and it creates solidarity, summed up in his twist on Descartes, “I revolt, therefore we are”. In the SEP’s reading, this means that killing anyone, even an oppressor, breaks the solidarity that justified the revolt in the first place, and Camus called faith in history “another religion” because it sacrifices living people to a supposedly better future. The SEP calls the resulting tension the most difficult theme of The Rebel: it is impossible to embrace rebellion while rejecting violence altogether, and, by the SEP’s account, Camus could not spell out how a successful revolution would stay true to that limit. Whether he would pull Foot’s lever is guesswork. His writing suggests he would distrust anyone who pulled it with a clean conscience.

The meme has a political layer too. The trolley problem, in its switch version, asks whether one life may be spent to save five. Camus faced the political version of that question after 1945, when the argument was whether revolutionary violence could be justified by the future it promised, and the title of his 1946 series gives his answer in four words: neither victims nor executioners.

January 1960: The Facel Vega on the Road to Paris

Albert Camus died in a car crash on 4 January 1960, when the Facel Vega in which he was a passenger hit two trees near Villeblevin, south-east of Paris.

The car was driven by Michel Gallimard, his publisher, who lost control, possibly after a tyre burst, and died five days later, according to The New European. Gallimard’s wife and daughter survived with injuries. Camus had planned to take the train back to Paris and had an unused ticket in his coat pocket. In a briefcase found on the grass nearby lay the handwritten manuscript of The First Man, the novel he was working on. He was 46 and had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, according to Britannica.

A darker theory circulates. In a 2011 article for Corriere della Sera and a 2019 book, The Death of Camus, the Italian writer Giovanni Catelli argued that the KGB sabotaged the car’s tyre, as The Guardian reported. His main evidence is a diary entry by the Czech poet Jan Zábrana, who wrote down what an unnamed, well-connected man told him: that the tyre was rigged to fail at high speed, on the orders of the Soviet minister Dmitri Shepilov, as revenge for Camus’ attack on the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. The evidence is secondhand and unconfirmed. Alison Finch, a Cambridge scholar of French literature, told The Guardian she was not persuaded, and she called the related suggestion that French authorities were involved implausible. Until stronger evidence appears, the crash is best treated as an accident.

For a full introduction to Camus and the absurd, read What is absurdism? A philosopher’s guide to Albert Camus and the absurd.