‘Disagreement itself has become morally legible’: Glenn Loury critiques self-censorship

Glenn Loury, professor of economics and social sciences at Brown University, warned against self-censorship in civil discourse and beyond in a talk hosted by the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. 

The Wednesday event was part of the 2026 Arrow Lecture Series on Ethics and Leadership. During the event, Loury implicated academics, journalists and the broader democratic landscape in the diminution of public candor, highlighting the dangers that conformity poses to public discourse. 

In his lecture, Loury drew on topics from his recent book “Self-Censorship,” which argues that self-ascribed limitations in public discourse stifle the emergence of well-formed ideas. “If the probability of persuading one’s audience is low, and if the reputational penalty for being misread is high, then…effective conformity becomes the preferred strategy,” he said.

Loury described self-censorship as “the equilibrium outcome of rational behavior,” and emphasized its compounding nature stating “silence today produces greater silence tomorrow.” 

“Once some people choose to suppress their views, others update their beliefs about what can safely be said, and the perceived reputational risk of expressing those views increases,” Loury said.

Loury warned that if such behavior is left unchecked, disciplines like science, journalism and even democracy itself will be at risk of collapse. Drawing on research from Kenneth Arrow, the namesake of the lecture series, Loury said informational networks are shaped by the values of institutions like Stanford. He attributed self-censorship to these environments rather than the individuals that populate them.

“Each individual responds independently to the same incentive environment,” Loury said. “And yet, when many face similar incentives, the equilibrium result can be collective silence or expressive distortion.”

When asked about the solution to the incentive problem in the Q&A, Loury admitted he is pessimistic, describing the country as “getting deeper and deeper into [a] hole,” and struggles himself to find an answer.

“I thought Professor Loury gave a very insightful speech about a systematic and structural problem that we have and in our society, our institutions, which I think is a very cumbersome and hard one to solve,” said attendee Will Gibbs ’28. 

Loury warned against a future shaped by systems of self-censorship. “Argumentation becomes ritual, compromise becomes betrayal. This culminates in what can be described as the collapse of common knowledge,” he said. “Not only [of] shared belief, but [of] a shared understanding about what others believe and what they know about what we believe.”

Loury applied his “sequencing approach” — in which inquiry comes before moral judgement rather than following it — to several modern issues including race, university environments and the Israel-Palestine conflict. In discussing the latter case, Loury criticized the moralization of complex terminology, such as the word “genocide.” 

“The argument is no longer about law, it’s about who the speaker is,” he said. “The rational response for many scholars is therefore silence, extreme hedging or withdrawal into purely technical language that avoids the central moral question altogether.”

“I thought it was an extremely powerful talk, a rigorous game-theoretic model applied to a topic of genuine moral concern in today’s America,” McCoy Center director Leif Wenar told The Daily. 

Loury emphasized that while the “candor” necessary for productive discourse doesn’t often occur in public, it flourishes in private between academics. 

“Crucially, the fear driving that silence is not a fear of being wrong. Scholars are accustomed to being wrong. It’s a fear of being misread,” Loury said.

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