Things I had to look up: bien pensant

bien pensant -- A French term meaning "right-minded" or "right-thinking," it is used as a literary term in English to refer to those who adopt the orthodoxy of others to substitute for their own thoughts and opinions.

Context: In a long profile of V.S. Naipaul in the Guardian/Observer:

By 1971, the year in which he won the Booker Prize for In A Free State, Naipaul's literary self was fully at large in the world and would fuel three decades in which he travelled a long way from the comedy of his early fiction to the more sinister images of A Bend in the River, his masterpiece, and the later, more personal fictions, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World. His journalism and incessant travelling took him into the muslim world of Among the Believers and Beyond Belief and made him enemies among bien pensant western liberals as well as muslims. Today, he exudes the satisfaction of one who has been proved substantially right about Islam. He says he does not like some of the controversy he has aroused, but affects insouciance. 'When I read those things, I am immensely amused. They don't wound me at all.'

I was not aware of this phrase's origins, so when I see it baldly translated and used without irony as an adjective -- as in this sentence from an editorial today about the suppression of demonstrations in Tibet:

The current protests in Tibet and the response of the Chinese authorities have attracted the attention of every right-thinking man or woman with access to the free media, and the vast majority of the people are sympathetic toward the Tibetans

One has to wonder if people who use the phrase without irony are aware that it's supposed to be used ironically. Or is it possible that using the French version carries irony that the English cannot?