It is notable that in everyday life we rarely talk, or hear those around us talking, about values.
Where we do hear much talk of values is from those who start wars and kill people, as well as those who explain and justify the wars and the killing: the leaders and politicians who declare the wars, and the intellectuals, journalists and ideologues who defend and enable their decisions.
They tell us that by going to war they defend the values that underpin our way of life and civilisation, and offer this as the ultimate justification for killing.
What we need to understand is that it is not the values that we purportedly defend that define us as civilised, moral and just, as people of good will; it is the practices that we employ to uphold our value claims that either grant or deny us this status.
Samuel Johnson wrote that a person can be well intentioned but poor in practice: they mean well, yet acting wrongly. We can also imagine the opposite condition: acting well but only for pragmatic reasons, being entirely void of a good will. The question then arises as to who is more civilised?
If we know the intentions of each actor we might consider the former as noble and the latter as mercenary.
But this is of little import, or at best of secondary import, to those bearing the consequences of each. From their perspective, it is the mercenary – the one who acts well and causes no harm even whilst perhaps thinking ill of others – who is civilised.
Actions speak louder than declared intentions. It is through actions and not declared intentions that we judge not only whether we are being treated civilly, but also whether those telling us they kill to uphold noble values are in fact telling us the truth.