In 1948, four philosophers met in a tea shop to talk about being rude. Their purpose, apart from tea, was simple: to find the best way to explain exactly why a popular philosophical position in ethical philosophy — the claim that, since only empirical facts can be true, any value judgment that something is “good” or “bad” is without meaningful content — was completely absurd.
Versions of this argument, popularized in European philosophy by David Hume, which still have surprising purchase in American letters (ask a third-grader to define “opinion” and see what happens), had become entrenched in Anglophone philosophy during the decades the philosophers at the tea shop were students and in some cases professors together at Oxford. Philippa Foot, who would ultimately become famous for articles that persuaded many to abandon the Humean position, was trying out the argument that the concept of rudeness provides a clear refutation of the so-called fact–value distinction, between merely descriptive and properly evaluative language. An act of rudeness is meaningful to us because rudeness is viscerally both a descriptive and an evaluative word — so much so that, as everyone knows, the awkwardness that ensues can even be painful.
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