> Putting people in a position where they need to treat their power with absolute humility or accept humiliation (and a major blow to their careers) in order to do the right thing is going to fail 99% of the time.

I don't know... we select those people. Usually not for their ability to treat their power with humility, though.

That's my argument in favour of quotas (e.g. for women): the way we select people in power now, we tend to have white old males who have the kind of relationship we know with power.

By deciding to select someone different (e.g. a woman), we may realise that not all humans are... well white old males. Not that we should select someone incompetent! But when we put someone in a position of power, I am convinced that many competitors are competent. We just tend to chose "the most competent" (with some definition of "the most"), which may not mean anything. For those positions, maybe it's more that either you are competent, or you are not.

Say from all the "competent" candidates, we systematically selected women for a while. We would end up with profiles that are not "white old males", and we may realise that it works just as well. Or even better. And that maybe some humans can treat power with humility.

And if that got us to accept that those are desirable traits for people in power, it may serve men as well: plenty of men are generally not selected for positions of power. Forcing us to realise this by having quotas of minorities (say women) may actually help "white old males who can treat their power with humility" get recognised eventually.