Power as a Burden: Leadership Screening and the Widened Moral Circle

Power, in any honest moral accounting, is a distributional choice. It makes some lives better and ruins others, and the person holding it is never innocent of that arithmetic. This is the premise Brian Klaas places at the center of his argument about who ends up in charge: if wielding power feels easy and fun, the wrong person holds it, because at the highest levels every decision is a redistribution of consequence across people who never consented to be affected. Reading Klaas as someone who has spent close to a decade tracing the moral circle — who counts, what is considered, whose suffering enters deliberation — the structural problem he names is familiar. The failure is not only that bad individuals rise; it is that the systems we have built select for people whose capacity for moral consideration is narrowed, sometimes pathologically, to the self. Leadership screening, on this reading, is not a human-resources refinement. It is an attempt to repair the boundary of the moral circle at the precise point where its contraction does the most damage.
 

The Disaggregation of Power-Seeking Traits

Klaas insists that the phrase “power corrupts” is only the visible tip of a larger iceberg, and that the more interesting problem is how systems attract and promote a particular kind of person. His method for getting at this is disaggregation: the so-called dark triad — Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy — is not a single syndrome but three separable parameters that can occur, and produce effects, in isolation. This is the same analytical move I rely on in my own field. When environmental ethicists argue over the criterion of moral considerability, we disaggregate: Singer isolates sentience, Regan isolates being the subject-of-a-life, Leopold isolates contribution to the integrity of the biotic community. The disagreement among them is productive precisely because the parameters are pulled apart. Klaas does the same with personality, and the results are similarly clarifying.
 

Machiavellianism, considered alone, is strategic cognition — a capacity to hold a plan, sequence moves, and discipline impulse against a future goal. Klaas is candid that this trait, in isolation, probably helps a person obtain power, and there is no reason in principle to treat it as morally disqualifying. The instrumental rationality it names is the same faculty any planner must have, including any conservation planner trying to sequence a multi-decade restoration across competing land uses. The trouble begins only when the strategy bends toward a goal with no moral content — when the future the strategist serves is the self.
 

Narcissism in isolation is more ambivalent still. Klaas notes that narcissists are hyper-attuned to how others perceive them, which makes them skilled at being liked, which in hierarchies organized around likability translates into advancement and higher pay. The personality instrument captures a real social competence. What it cannot capture, and what narcissism structurally resists, is the reordering of priority that genuine moral consideration requires — the willingness to let another’s good count for more than one’s own image. A narcissistic leader can read a room beautifully; what they cannot do is treat the room as anything other than a mirror.
 

Psychopathy is the parameter that cannot be repaired by proximity. Klaas’s sharpest claim is here: no matter how well a psychopath comes to know someone, the capacity to care does not arrive. Psychological distance — the felt awareness that one’s decisions land on real people — is the corrective for most leaders, but for the psychopathic it does nothing, because the deficit is not in information but in the affective infrastructure that turns information into concern. In isolation, psychopathy is rarer than the other two and tends to produce impulsive, risk-taking people, many of whom fail. The successful ones who do climb are power-hungry rather than competent, good at obtaining power and bad at wielding it.
 

The clustering is where the damage concentrates. Klaas observes that high psychopathy scores usually travel with elevated narcissism and Machiavellianism, and that the leadership positions most consequential for human welfare are disproportionately held by people in whom all three are elevated. The figure he cites is arresting: depending on the study, psychopaths are between 4 times and 100 times more represented in positions of power than in the general population. Whether the precise multiplier sits at the low or high end, the direction is unambiguous — we have built selection environments that over-recruit exactly the people whose moral circle is most contracted.
 

Source Reference Link: https://bigthink.com/series/the-big-think-interview/corrupt-systems
Link Brief: Political scientist Brian Klaas disaggregates the dark triad, argues power should be a psychological burden, and proposes screening tests plus a “what would make you unnecessary in power?” question for top leaders. This article adopts his disaggregation logic and screening prescriptions, extending them through the framework of moral considerability and intergenerational justice.
 

The case Klaas returns to is deliberately small and unglamorous: a homeowners’ association president in an Arizona community, given the pseudonym Martin McFife, who did not want to help his neighborhood so much as hold it. He purged rivals, invented arcane rules about out-of-state gravel and palm-tree trimming, fined dissenters, and when residents attempted a recall, rocks went through windows. What makes McFife instructive is the failure of proximity. His victims were next door. The psychological distance between decision and consequence was as short as it can be in any governance setting, and still the moral circle did not widen. McFife is the clean experimental demonstration of Klaas’s point about psychopathy: closeness does not generate consideration where the affective substrate for consideration is absent. I keep this case in view because the temptation in writing about power is to reach for heads of state and nuclear codes, and in doing so to miss the architecture of the problem, which replicates at every scale where someone self-selects into authority over others.
 

Moral Considerability and the Psychological Distance of Leaders

The concept I want to bring into contact with Klaas’s argument is moral considerability — the philosophical question of which beings count in our deliberation when we act. The history of environmental ethics is, in one telling, a sustained argument that this circle is wider than anthropocentric common sense admits: wider than adult rational humans, wider than humans as such, reaching sentient animals, living individuals, species, ecosystems, and the biotic community understood as a whole. Klaas is writing about a different circle — the circle of those a leader can hold in mind while deciding — but the structural question is identical. A leader whose moral considerability is narrowed to self, party, or present-tense constituency is functionally equivalent, in the architecture of the failure, to the anthropocentric civilization that cannot conceive of a forest, a watershed, or an unborn generation as a patient of its actions.
 

Klaas’s insistence that power should be a burden is, read this way, an insistence on keeping the affected inside the circle. The psychological distance he describes is not a measure of physical separation but of felt responsibility — the leader’s capacity to register that a signature, a veto, a budget line, a permitting decision lands on particular lives and particular ecologies. For most people this capacity is trainable; institutions can shorten the distance through deliberation, affected-party representation, and the simple discipline of forcing a decision-maker to sit with those who will bear the consequence. The limit case is the psychopath, for whom the distance can be driven to zero and still nothing arrives. That asymmetry — distance is manipulable for most and useless for a pathological few — is what makes screening defensible. It is not a claim that most leaders are broken; it is a claim that systems must be built to exclude the small fraction for whom no institutional design can substitute.
 

There is a real disagreement here that I do not want to flatten. Some political theorists hold that psychological distance is almost entirely an artifact of institutional design — that term limits, sortition, mandatory consultation, and deliberative assemblies can produce responsible leadership from almost any personality, because the structure does the moral work the person cannot. On this view, screening is a dangerous concession, because it hands a small professional class the power to define psychological normalcy and to exclude dissenters as disordered. Klaas, in my reading, does not deny the power of design but refuses to treat it as sufficient, holding that a personality-anchored deficit in empathy cannot be engineered away. My own work leans toward Klaas’s side while taking the institutionalist warning seriously: the moral circle is widened both by structures that force consideration and by the selection of people capable of feeling consideration. Neither alone is enough. The risk of a screening regime is that it becomes a technocratic substitute for the harder, slower work of building institutions that make consideration unavoidable; the risk of relying on institutions alone is that they ask empathy of people who do not have it to give.
 

The McFife case returns here as evidence against the pure institutionalist position. The HOA had recall elections, bylaws, and neighborly proximity — a thicket of institutional constraint — and still the pathology expressed itself until the community physically ejected the man. Structures slow the wrong people; they do not always refuse them entry.
 

Intergenerational Reach: When Decisions Outlive the Decider

Klaas’s most consequential example is the leader with sole or primary authority over nuclear weapons, a person whose choices can end the species. The moral circle, in that office, must extend not only across present geography but across time, to people who do not yet exist and cannot vote, protest, or be consulted. This is the territory of intergenerational justice, and it is where the analogy between Klaas’s screening proposal and ecological ethics becomes more than rhetorical.
 

The defining feature of the decisions that matter most — climate policy, nuclear posture, biodiversity loss, the siting of long-lived toxic infrastructure — is that their benefits accrue to the present decision-maker and their costs fall on people not yet born. Klaas names this a distributional choice within the present; extended across generations it becomes a distributional choice between present and future, in which the future has no seat at the table. The temporal asymmetry is the structural twin of the psychological-distance problem: a leader can hold present sufferers in mind only with effort, and future sufferers only with imagination and moral discipline. A leader for whom the future is not a patient of consideration is making the same error, at a longer reach, as the one for whom the neighbor is not a patient.
 

Here I have to register a genuine scholarly tension rather than paper over it. Parfit’s non-identity problem complicates the case for duties to future generations, because the very identity of future people depends on what present people choose — so it can be argued that no future person is made worse off by a choice that also brings them into existence. Some philosophers take this to weaken our obligations to the unborn. I lean the other way, and I think Klaas’s logic, extended, leans with me: the non-identity problem is an argument for screening, not against it, precisely because the future cannot retaliate, organize, or withhold consent. When the affected party has no voice and no exit, the burden on the decider’s moral imagination is at its maximum, and the case for selecting deciders whose imagination is reliably capacious is at its strongest. Stephen Gardiner has called climate change an intergenerational “perfect moral storm” because it marries temporal dispersion to institutional weakness; the screening proposal is, at minimum, a response to the institutional-weakness half of that storm.
 

The question Klaas says he most wants asked of anyone seeking immense power is this: what would it take for you to think you are no longer necessary in power? Read intergenerationally, this is a question about whether the candidate can conceive of a future state of the world in which their own centrality is not required — a future in which the institutions, the ecosystems, the people have outgrown the need for them. A leader who cannot answer has placed no temporal boundary on their own indispensability, and that inability is the intergenerational form of the moral-circle failure. The trustee who will not name the condition of their own retirement is a trustee in name only.
 

Screening as System Design: From Self-Selection to Moral Selection

Klaas’s diagnosis is that the deeper iceberg is not corruption-by-power but selection-by-system. Broken systems attract and promote the wrong people because the self-selection bias is real: the power-hungry put themselves forward at rates that ordinary people, who regard authority as a burden, do not. The result is a leadership class that is not representative — not average, not normal — and not in the benign sense. The fix he proposes has two layers: psychological screening at the threshold of the highest offices, and a less formal scrutiny of motive, anchored by the exit question, designed to expose those who seek power for its own sake.
 

The ecological parallel is exact, and I want to draw it carefully without overclaiming. An anthropocentric political economy is itself a selection environment: it rewards projects that convert living systems into short-term human utility and quietly retires those that do not. To change ecological outcomes, you do not primarily exhort individuals; you redesign the selection environment so that consideration for the non-human and the future is built into the cost of decision. Klaas is proposing the same move for the selection of leaders. Screening is not moralism; it is selection-environment design.
 

Where I would extend his proposal, drawing on the paradigm of my own field, is in what the screening tests for. Klaas’s instruments will catch the dark triad, and they should. The deeper test is the scope of a candidate’s moral considerability — whether, in their own deliberative habit, they include non-human stakeholders and future generations as patients of their decisions. A leader with low dark-triad scores but a rigidly anthropocentric moral circle is, from an intergenerational standpoint, only a slower catastrophe. The screening that matters most is the one that asks not only whether you care about people but whether the set of beings you count as people in your moral arithmetic is wide enough to carry the office.
 

I have to concede the limitations honestly. Psychological screening is vulnerable to false positives, to cultural bias baked into personality instruments developed largely on Western undergraduate populations, and — most seriously — to politicization, the use of a clinical vocabulary to exclude disfavored candidates. Klaas himself insists that elections remain essential and that screening supplements rather than replaces democratic choice. That sequencing matters. A screening regime that overrides the ballot is a different kind of system, and not one I would defend. The defensible version is a filter above democracy, not a substitute for it — a mechanism that asks, before the electorate decides, whether the candidate can even read the moral consequences of the office. Even then, the instruments must be public, the criteria contestable, and the results revisable, or the cure recapitulates the disease.
 

There are structural complements to screening that an ecological reading makes visible. Term limits shorten the temporal reach of any single pathological leader. Sortition — selection by lottery — defeats self-selection bias by removing the incentive to seek power at all, which is why it has been proposed for citizen climate assemblies. Mandatory ecological and intergenerational impact assessment, tied to the threshold of high office, builds consideration into the cost of decision the way environmental impact statements, in principle, build it into the cost of projects. None of these is sufficient alone; together they form what I would call a selection environment engineered for a wider circle.
 

The Open Question: Can a Leader Name Their Own Exit?

I want to end where Klaas ends, with the exit question, because it is philosophically deeper than its policy framing suggests. What would it take for you to think you are no longer necessary in power? The question asks whether a candidate can conceive of their own dispensability — whether they can hold, without collapse, the image of a world that has outgrown them.
 

In the ecocentric tradition I work within — Leopold’s land ethic, Naess’s deep ecology, the broader line that takes the self to be relational rather than sovereign — a mature self does not require dominance for its coherence. The self that is constituted by relationship, by participation in a wider biotic and social community, can relinquish a position without relinquishing itself. The self that is constituted only by control cannot. A leader who cannot answer the exit question reveals a self internally impoverished in exactly the way the anthropocentric civilization is impoverished when it cannot imagine flourishing without extraction: both depend on a relation of dominance for their very sense of being.
 

Read this way, the screening test Klaas proposes is a test of self-constitution, not merely of personality. It asks whether the candidate can hold power as trusteeship — a burden held on behalf of a circle wider than the self — or whether power, for them, is the substance of the self. This is the point at which the environmental-ethics paradigm and the political-psychology argument touch most directly. The leader who cannot name an exit condition is the same figure, structurally, as the civilization that cannot name a limit to growth; both have conflated expansion of the self with flourishing of the whole.
 

The conclusion I am willing to defend is weighted rather than symmetrical. Screening is necessary because the systems we have built over-recruit people whose moral circle is contracted, and because the institutions that might substitute for empathy cannot reach the small fraction for whom empathy is structurally absent. Screening is not sufficient because the circle can be contracted in ways the dark-triad instruments do not catch — above all in the temporal and species dimension — and because a screening regime unchecked by democratic contestation becomes its own pathology. Democracy remains the floor. Screening is a filter above it, and its proper ambition is modest: to refuse the highest offices to those who cannot bear the weight of the consequences they will impose on people who never consented, including people who do not yet exist. The deeper cultural task — cultivating an understanding of power as trusteeship rather than possession — is slower work than any test, and it is the work that finally determines whether the institutions hold.
 

References:
 

• Klaas, B. (2021). *Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us.* Hachette Books. [Source interview: Big Think, “Why psychopaths rise to power” — https://bigthink.com/series/the-big-think-interview/corrupt-systems]
• Leopold, A. (1949). *A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There.* Oxford University Press.
• Singer, P. (1975). *Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals.* HarperCollins.
• Regan, T. (1983). *The Case for Animal Rights.* University of California Press.
• Naess, A. (1973). “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements: A Summary.” *Inquiry*, 16(1–4), 95–100.
• Parfit, D. (1984). *Reasons and Persons.* Oxford University Press.
• Gardiner, S. M. (2011). *A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change.* Oxford University Press.
• Paulhus, D. L., & Williams, K. M. (2002). “The Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy.” *Journal of Research in Personality*, 36(6), 556–563.

May this inquiry widen the circle of your consideration — and your reading.


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