It's clear that people have ordinal preferences over certain world-states, and that many of these preferences are quite stable from day to day. And people have some ability to trade these off with probabilities, suggesting cardinal preferences as well. It seems correct and useful to refer to this as "values", at least approximately.

On the other hand, it's clear that our brains do not implement some function that assigns a real number to world-states. That's one of the reasons that it's so hard to distinguish human values in the first place.