Pleasure as well as pain are regarded as distinctive feeling tones that determine a person's happiness level. The more pleasures or pleasant feelings a person have, the more happy he/she is. On the other side, painful feeling is what can distract or deprive happiness. Furthermore, narrow hedonism believes that every pleasure provides the same feelings for everyone who got the pleasure. Mill explains that as a feeling it cannot be described but something that can be felt. A pleasurable experience such as watching a movie in the cinema should be pleasurable and share the same feelings to everyone that experience it. Meanwhile, all of the people who experience a painful feeling such as being heartbroken by their love relationship, should also feel the same distinctive tone. Thus it can also be said that in narrow hedonism, there are certain standards of happiness that could be roughly measure between the proportion of pleasure and pain. For example, a person that has a 80% of pleasant feelings and only 10% of sad feelings would be considered as either happy or very happy. .
However, preference hedonism does not recognize such distinctive feeling tones that could make anybody who experiences it happy. Instead, preference hedonism believes that happiness does not rely on the feeling itself, rather it depends on the desire of the person towards the experience. Preference hedonism is originally defended by Sidgwick (1907, pg. 127) that says, the only common quality (among pleasures) seems to be the relation to desire and volition expressed by the general term 'desirable'." In this theory, pleasure is argued as a desirable consciousness". An experience could give different feeling based on each person desire. The more an experience pleasant for a person does not mean the more the experience is more pleasurable in itself, but it means that the experience is more desired by the person. Preference hedonism might bring the case of masochism where painful experience is seen as pleasurable.
