Epistemic Modesty in Cross-Cultural AI Ethics: Against Forced Relevance and Coerced Inclusion

In the expanding discourse on AI alignment and ethics, interdisciplinarity and cultural inclusivity are often treated as intrinsic goods. This has led to a proliferation of efforts connecting artificial intelligence with diverse cultural, religious, and philosophical frameworks. While such engagements can offer valuable perspectives, they also risk producing epistemic distortions when pursued without a clear rationale or contextual necessity. This paper identifies two such distortions: forced relevance and coerced inclusion. It first interrogates the growing tendency to draw connections between AI and external frameworks—such as theology, feminism, or postcolonial theory—not because a specific ethical or technical challenge demands them, but because these discourses are academically available or currently in vogue. When interdisciplinarity is treated as an end in itself, it risks instrumentalizing both AI and the traditions it draws upon, obscuring the purposes of each. Second, the paper challenges the assumption that all communities seek or ought to seek participation in global AI ethics discourse. Ethical reasoning in many traditions may be expressed through silence, ritual, or non-textual forms that do not conform to dominant expectations of discursive inclusion. When legitimacy is linked to visibility, these epistemologies are often sidelined. To address these concerns, the paper introduces the concept of epistemic modesty, a principled stance that respects irrelevance, dignifies refusal, and accepts non-participation as a legitimate ethical position. Rather than rejecting cultural engagement, it advocates for a more thoughtful and pluralistic approach to cross-cultural AI, one that listens carefully, engages selectively, and upholds the right not to align.