The unwelcome return to the use of petitio principii in public policy

Given that one of us wrote a standard work on the use and abuse of logical fallacies it’s worth our pointing at the return of one such to the public realm. As that source says about petitio principii:

The fallacy of petitio principii, otherwise known as “begging the question”, occurs whenever use is made in the argument of something which the conclusion seeks to establish…(,,,),,,It might seem to the novice that the petitio is not a fallacy to take for a long walk; it seems to fragile to take for any distance. Yet a short look at the world of political discourse reveals petitios in profusion,…

Indeed so and here’s a glory of an example:

The Institute of Race Relations thinktank said it would be hard to have confidence in the commission’s outcomes.

“Any enquiry into inequality has to acknowledge structural and systemic factors. Munira Mirza’s previous comments describe a ‘grievance culture’ within the anti-racist field and she has previously argued that institutional racism is ‘a perception more than a reality’,” a spokesperson said. “It is difficult to have any confidence in policy recommendations from someone who denies the existence of the very structures that produce the social inequalities experienced by black communities.”

The Labour MP Diane Abbott, a former shadow home secretary, said: “A new race equalities commission led by Munira Mirza is dead on arrival. She has never believed in institutional racism.”

The question we’d like an answer to is how much is racial inequality to do with institutional and or structural racism and how much to do with demographics (the BAME population is rather younger than the non-BAME), status as recent immigrants, the terrors of inner city educational systems, any cultural factors anyone wants to throw in the pot and so on? We’d like to know what is going on and why.

The insistence here is that anyone who does not already leap to the conclusion that it’s entirely structural and institutional racism may not be allowed to even run the investigation. That is, no one not committing the logical error of petitio principii is allowed to ask the question - only those who beg it can be included.

Demanding that an inquiry into what we agree is an important question start with a logical fallacy doesn’t seem like quite the way to run a country to us. Perhaps it’s us that’s out of kilter though, presumably because we have actually read - and one of us written - that book on logical fallacies and are therefore informed upon the matter.