"He who thinks and thinks for himself, will always have a claim to thanks; it is no matter whether it be right or wrong, so as it be explicit. If it is right, it will serve as a guide to direct; if wrong, as a beacon to warn"
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Bentham is doing something sly here: he’s praising independence of mind while quietly setting the terms for what counts as a civic virtue. The hero of the sentence isn’t the person who’s correct; it’s the person who is legible. “Explicit” is the hinge. In an age when politics and morals were still tangled with inherited authority, Bentham’s utilitarian project depended on arguments that could be inspected, disputed, measured, and revised. Vague piety and genteel common sense don’t help you optimize anything.
The line also smuggles in a disciplinary ideal. Think for yourself, yes - but do it in a way that leaves a paper trail. A wrong idea, if clearly stated, becomes socially useful because it can be tested, refuted, and turned into a warning sign. Bentham treats error not as a sin but as data. That’s Enlightenment confidence with an accountant’s temperament: even mistakes can be repurposed for the general good.
There’s a quiet rebuke to fashionable skepticism, too. If you refuse to commit to a claim, you can’t be corrected, and you can’t correct anyone else. Bentham’s “thanks” is less sentimental gratitude than a kind of moral wage paid to those who make reasoning public.
Read in context, it’s a defense of argumentative transparency as infrastructure for reform - the same impulse behind Bentham’s attacks on opaque legal traditions and his fixation on codification. The beacon metaphor is doing double duty: it flatters the thinker as a public service while warning that private cleverness, left implicit, is just darkness with better manners.
The line also smuggles in a disciplinary ideal. Think for yourself, yes - but do it in a way that leaves a paper trail. A wrong idea, if clearly stated, becomes socially useful because it can be tested, refuted, and turned into a warning sign. Bentham treats error not as a sin but as data. That’s Enlightenment confidence with an accountant’s temperament: even mistakes can be repurposed for the general good.
There’s a quiet rebuke to fashionable skepticism, too. If you refuse to commit to a claim, you can’t be corrected, and you can’t correct anyone else. Bentham’s “thanks” is less sentimental gratitude than a kind of moral wage paid to those who make reasoning public.
Read in context, it’s a defense of argumentative transparency as infrastructure for reform - the same impulse behind Bentham’s attacks on opaque legal traditions and his fixation on codification. The beacon metaphor is doing double duty: it flatters the thinker as a public service while warning that private cleverness, left implicit, is just darkness with better manners.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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