es and falsehoods in Smith's arguments. Ricardo was a friend of James Mill, and it was the encouragement of James Mill that caused Ricardo to publish his major economic works during the early-1800s. Ricardo was given credit for developing more complete theories than Smith, based on a deeper analysis of relevant economic relationships during the later stages of the Industrial Revolution. John Stuart Mill eventually took the analysis even deeper. He built on the foundations laid by Ricardo, but through historical references and detailed examples he built bridges between abstract theory and the actual day-to-day workings of economic systems. Generally, Mill's writing is considered to be more understandable and more relevant for most readers of economic theory.
In addition to his economic writings, Mill made major con-tributions in the fields of philosophy, logic, and ethics. He also expanded a theory known as ?MDUL?utilitarianism?MDNM?, a school of thought that focused on ethics and morality in terms of the outcomes of actions. Under the traditional doctrine described by Jeremy Bentham in 1838, it was argued that the ultimate morality was the "greatest happiness" principle, that the pleasure or pain of an outcome was the measure of its goodness. The doctrine had many critics, and Mill set out to defend it. But in doing so, he departed from the "pleasure-pain" criteria and sought to link normative ethics to the "goodness" of an outcome. To Mill, pleasure was not the sole good, nor was pain the sole evil. Instead, he recognized that "the rightness of actions turns on the goodness, and not simply the pleasure-pain content, of their con-sequences." His attempts to alter the doctrine were unsettling to many utilitarians. According to one author, the traditional "Benthamite utilitarians could be excused for preferring the attecks of non-utilitarians to the defenses and restatements offered by John Stuart Mill."?FN1H. J. McCloskey...