A guidance system composed of explicit precepts would be an artificial one. Understanding someone’s ethos requires much more than knowledge of their expressed beliefs. To read a precept pragmatically is to form the concept of living by this precept. When you compare your concept with the actual practice you observe among professed believers in the precept, you may observe discrepancies. You could easily leap to the conclusion that those who profess to follow the precept are hypocritical. But it’s also possible, given the fact of polyversity, that their reading of it differs from yours. To understand how they read it, you would have to study their guidance system as a whole and observe how the specific precept fits into that system.
Values are part of the modeling process. Anything we can evaluate – approach or avoid, save or condemn, worship or despise – can only be a feature of a model, valued according to its role as a functional part of that model which is its context. We can only evaluate people’s conduct in relation to a common (communal) guidance system. To evaluate someone else’s model, then, you would have to reduce it to a feature in your own concept of the universal guidance system. But what if each of us sentient beings is a single bodymind doing one’s best to make sense of a unique body of experience? Judge not, lest you be judged.