It is this relationship of relative suffering (or pleasure) that the utilitarian seeks to capture in assigning numerical values to various consequences. This is, the utilitarian further argues, something which we do quite naturally in our everyday lives. The utilitarian calculus is but a refinement and formalization of that everyday activity of assigning relative values to various occurrences, of ranking them in relation to each other according to the amount of pleasure or pain they yield. But as soon as cardinal utilitarians admit this, they are on their way to becoming preference utilitarians.