CASE 1 · PRACTICAL ETHICS · RESEARCHER A
Does predicting people via AI disrespect them?
“Is it problematically disrespectful to people if we use AI to make predictions about their beliefs and actions?”
How the Studio approached it
Two parallel Round Table sessions were run on the same question. The first engaged Western philosophical traditions; the second drew on global and decolonial frameworks. The results of the two were then systematically compared. Crucially, the methodology did not try to merge them. Rather than forcing a synthesis, it held the two readings side by side and examined where, and why, they parted company.
What it found
The Western-focused analysis located the problem in a particular kind of reduction: predicting a person can move them from being an “I–You” agent, addressed as a subject, to an “I–It” object of calculation. On this account the disrespect lies in displacing practical wisdom and intentional action with inference about a person made from the outside.
The global and decolonial analysis identified a different problem, one that is structural rather than interpersonal. Here prediction functions ideologically: it tends to universalise a Western, individualist picture of the person and to impose it on communal realities organised quite differently. The objection is not to the single act of predicting but to the worldview the practice carries with it.
The Studio named the resulting tension as one between a “bio-logic” built on individual bodies and a “socio-logic” built on relationships — a distinction that did not exist in either source tradition on its own but emerged from setting them against each other.
Conceptual Vacancy Detected
The analysis found that the term “disrespectful” itself carries moderate conceptual vacancy at the cross-cultural level. Different traditions specify respect through incompatible frameworks — Western individualism on one side, and on the other a relational account in which the self is constituted through others (as in Ubuntu). Because the word points to different things in different traditions, a single verdict on “disrespect” would have been false precision. The Studio did not resolve this by synthesis. It identified that the epistemically appropriate response was a pluralist meta-consensus: an explicit acknowledgement that the judgement is tradition-dependent, rather than a manufactured agreement that conceals that fact.
How claims were marked
The two findings were not given equal epistemic standing. That epistemological diversity exists across traditions was marked SUPPORTABLE — very high confidence, resting on an extensive literature. The further claim that “respectful prediction is possible under ideal conditions” was marked HYPOTHETICAL — a conditional worth exploring, not an established result. Keeping these apart is what stops a fluent argument from quietly upgrading a speculation into a conclusion.
What this case demonstrates
The case shows protocol-governed inquiry doing two things at once. It addresses the well-known risks of using AI in ethical reasoning — over-confidence, flattening, false closure — while preserving two genuinely incommensurable frameworks rather than collapsing them into a compromise neither would accept. Along the way it diagnosed vacancy in the very term the question turned on, and it kept empirically grounded claims clearly separate from speculative ones. The output is not a ruling on whether prediction is disrespectful. It is a precise map of why reasonable traditions answer differently, and of exactly where the human judgement now has to be made.