In practice, values have to be deduced from behaviour, unless perhaps where they are clearly and honestly expressed in words. Values themselves are neither physical facts nor human acts, they move human emotion and thought or are expressed through motivations that can be traced back to certain ideals of common humanity.
A value judgement can by identified as a judgement expressing one's belief in the desirability or undesirability of some personal, social, cultural or other state of affairs. A value judgement may be made either in full or only partial awareness of one's own motivations, or it may be unwittingly expressed through behaviour, reflecting aims that one has absorbed from one's background or identified with in a variety of subconscious ways. Any individual (or collective) value judgement may itself be seen as expressing one of the 'universal' human values (see below). Universal values are the origin of all true values, however well or poorly each of us under our divergent circumstances recognizes them and acts them out in reality.