“Don’t do things that would make other people regret doing a thing that you generally want people to do” seems like a good behavioral rule-of-thumb but I don’t feel like it gets at the core of rudeness.
I think rudeness is sometimes used intentionally to discourage unwanted activities (belittling someone who argued against you, mocking someone who tried to compete with you, ignoring someone you don’t want to talk to). I think your rule also struggles to explain examples of rudeness like interrupting a conversation (as a third party), asking an unreasonable favor, or giving someone unsolicited spoilers.
Conversely, it seems like your rule covers behaviors like stealing and betrayal that are objectionable but wouldn’t typically be described as “rude”.
Actually, what you said is pretty close to what I currently tentatively use as my fundamental test of general ethical behavior, which is something like
Honor the deals you would’ve made (if idealized versions of you and the other parties had had unlimited time to negotiate at some point in the past, possibly from behind a veil of ignorance although I don’t feel very sure about that part).
For example, we probably could’ve agreed to not take each others’ stuff (with some narrow but important caveats), and so stealing is (mostly) wrong.
If I discover you pouring a bottle of mysterious liquid down the well one night, then I think (with caveats) that it’s right for me to give you a chance to explain yourself, and it’s right for you to stop pouring and not try to run for the duration of that conversation, because we could probably have made a deal along the lines of “if one of us finds the other doing something that looks bad, the finder will hear them out (rather than immediately attacking) if the other doesn’t try to exploit the delay.”
If you open a hotdog stand, it’s not wrong of me to also open one and compete with you, because we probably would not have made a deal like “whoever gets into a particular business first has a protected monopoly on it for as long as they want it”. (If everyone made deals like that, it would cause a bunch of problems.)
“Don’t do things that would make other people regret doing a thing that you generally want people to do” seems like a good behavioral rule-of-thumb but I don’t feel like it gets at the core of rudeness.
I think rudeness is sometimes used intentionally to discourage unwanted activities (belittling someone who argued against you, mocking someone who tried to compete with you, ignoring someone you don’t want to talk to). I think your rule also struggles to explain examples of rudeness like interrupting a conversation (as a third party), asking an unreasonable favor, or giving someone unsolicited spoilers.
Conversely, it seems like your rule covers behaviors like stealing and betrayal that are objectionable but wouldn’t typically be described as “rude”.
Actually, what you said is pretty close to what I currently tentatively use as my fundamental test of general ethical behavior, which is something like
Honor the deals you would’ve made (if idealized versions of you and the other parties had had unlimited time to negotiate at some point in the past, possibly from behind a veil of ignorance although I don’t feel very sure about that part).
For example, we probably could’ve agreed to not take each others’ stuff (with some narrow but important caveats), and so stealing is (mostly) wrong.
If I discover you pouring a bottle of mysterious liquid down the well one night, then I think (with caveats) that it’s right for me to give you a chance to explain yourself, and it’s right for you to stop pouring and not try to run for the duration of that conversation, because we could probably have made a deal along the lines of “if one of us finds the other doing something that looks bad, the finder will hear them out (rather than immediately attacking) if the other doesn’t try to exploit the delay.”
If you open a hotdog stand, it’s not wrong of me to also open one and compete with you, because we probably would not have made a deal like “whoever gets into a particular business first has a protected monopoly on it for as long as they want it”. (If everyone made deals like that, it would cause a bunch of problems.)