I find it interesting that many replies seem to take a sort of ‘mechanistic’ tone, perhaps a science-oriented approach? For myself, I understand “values” to be a human quality. And to me, that (“human”) means that there may be a bit of logic and reason going on, but probably a lot more too. Are we not emotion-driven beings?
In the context of viewing humans as black boxes: yes. However, I am trying to analyze the internal components.
And some of those “components” are associated with emotion, no?
But values are determined precisely by one’s relationship to other individuals in society. Therefore, the biological needs of an individual cannot be defined as values.