Beyond the Zero-Sum Impasse
—The Ethics of War and Peace for Resolving the Russia–Ukraine Conflict
Ma Siwei (马四维)
The British philosopher Nigel Dower (奈杰尔·道尔), honorary senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, has long studied global ethics, global citizenship, development and environmental ethics, and the ethics of war and peace. His approach to “global ethics” and “global citizenship,” and his position on the ethics of war and peace, advocate a cosmopolitan orientation to pacificism (“cosmopolitan pacificism”), which emphasizes understanding “peace” as the active construction of conditions and institutions, not merely the absence of war. Dower’s arguments help us discuss the Russia–Ukraine conflict and how to move beyond a zero-sum deadlock.
Dower is not adding a few moral maxims to the traditional framework of national interests; he is fundamentally relocating the starting point of ethical discussion from the state back to the person, and on that basis rewriting the grammar by which we understand war, development, the environment, and global governance. To understand Dower’s ethics of war and peace, we must situate his claims within a “world perspective.”
In World Ethics: The New Agenda (《世界伦理：新的议程》), which uses a global-ethics framework to discuss poverty, the environment, the United Nations, and global governance, Dower first systematically reviews the main ethical positions in international relations, then compares how poverty, the environment, and global institutions are handled by each, ultimately pointing to a core proposition: once global interdependence has become a fact, the “scope of application” of ethics must expand outward from domestic law and the civic community to encompass all humanity and the natural community, or else any account of legitimacy that treats the state as the sole subject will collapse within the feedback loops of cross-border effects. In other words, he is not “adding virtue” to international politics; he is upgrading the “object of application” of ethics to the global scale, thereby requiring us to justify policies with reasons that can cross borders. This is the starting point of what he calls “world ethics.”
The framework of “world ethics” rests on several interlocking distinctions: skeptical realism, state-centric internationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Skeptical realism treats national security and interest maximization as the norm and is thus naturally suspicious of transnational justice and universal obligations; internationalism admits certain levels of international norms but still regards sovereign states as the primary bearers of ethical responsibility; cosmopolitanism, by contrast, asserts that certain responsibilities are not bounded by borders—human dignity and human needs precede passports. Most of today’s political problems—climate accounts, refugee responsibilities, pandemics and access to medicines, the exploitation and emissions embedded in transnational supply chains—cannot be resolved within a single national ethic; for Dower, they can only be rewritten through cosmopolitanism. On this basis, in the revised edition he continues to press for a “global perspective” on poverty and the environment: if a country’s path to emissions reduction, mineral extraction, or arms trading externalizes costs onto other countries or future generations, then relying on domestic benefits as the sole justification is ethically insufficient.
In parallel with “world ethics,” Dower’s An Introduction to Global Citizenship (《全球公民权导论》) explains “whether and why we are global citizens.” He unpacks global citizenship into three claims: an ethical claim—we bear unavoidable moral obligations toward all humankind; an existential claim—in fact we already share an interdependent community; a visionary claim—by institutionalizing rights and obligations and consolidating community, the human outlook can be systematically improved. These three claims, from “ought to be,” to “is,” to “can be done,” form a closed loop: global citizenship is neither a purely emotive slogan nor a call to abolish the nation-state; rather, it shows how, in a reality of layered identities, the “obligation to strangers” can be embedded in institutions.
This line of thought culminates in the problem of war and peace. In The Ethics of War and Peace: Cosmopolitan and Other Perspectives (《战争与和平的伦理》), Dower systematically compares realism, just war theory, and pacifism/pacificism. He proposes a term that both rejects cynical realism and avoids “absolute nonviolence”: “cosmopolitan pacificism.” The key here is not to treat “no war” as the ultimate answer, but to make “constructing the conditions of peace” the processual goal: reduce armaments and the arms trade, prioritize the allocation of resources to public goods that can reduce human suffering across borders, strengthen the international legal order’s direct protection of individuals, and subject the “necessity” invoked by national-security narratives to review under the proportionality of global justice. The -fication in “pacificism” emphasizes sustained institutional engineering and behavioral restraint, so that violence is no longer “cheaply available” in structural terms. It resembles the family of traditional “pacifism,” but it places greater weight on institutional supply and executability, and thus is more operational in real-world conflict governance.
Set within the contemporary world, Dower’s first reminder is not to treat “universalism” as the patent of any one civilization, but to understand it as a set of minimum and maximum principles that can be claimed across cultures. The minimum principle is non-harm and non-insult to human dignity; the maximum principle is, at the level of global institutions, to expand as far as possible the set of human capabilities and opportunities. In his writing on the Earth Charter (《地球宪章》) and global ethics, this combination is concretized as four parallel pillars: ecological integrity, human rights, equitable development, and peace—indivisible and mutually balancing. That is, any destruction of nature in the name of “development,” any deprivation of rights in the name of “security,” any exclusion of the vulnerable in the name of “order,” placed within the coordinate system of world ethics, amounts only to a local logic of self-interest, not a replicable form of legitimacy.
At this point we must turn our lens to the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war. Dower’s cosmopolitanism is neither naïve enough to say “both sides should simply stop” nor abstract enough to retreat to proclamations of “the world for all”; instead, it offers three layers of practical logic. First, the lowest baselines of the just war tradition—self-defense, proportionality, discrimination—must be met, but the evaluating subject cannot be limited to the belligerents; we must introduce global publicness. When famine, energy prices, refugees, and environmental damage spill over into global public risks, any action that escalates the intensity of conflict must be recalculated under a global proportionality principle for its legitimacy and costs. This forces us, even as we focus on the battlefield, to make “how to shorten the lifespan of the war and narrow its radius of effect” central to ethical evaluation. Second is the structural engineering of pacification: beyond calibrating sanctions and military aid, the more critical task is how, at the global level, to reduce the supply of armaments, expand humanitarian corridors, and put in place postwar trusteeship and reconstruction mechanisms—the latter determine whether cycles of violence are structurally weakened. Third is the subjectivity of individuals and communities: cosmopolitanism does not dissolve persons into the state, and thus places particular emphasis on pathways of accountability for war crimes and the crime of aggression, on the direct jurisdiction of international criminal law over individuals, and on cross-border protection obligations for refugees and the wounded. Together these three layers form a realistic roadmap that neither condones aggression nor deifies “victory” as the sole ethical goal: it upholds the right of the victim of aggression to self-defense and the imperative to prevent faits accomplis, while continuously depressing the sustainability of war and the rate of return on initiating it, shortening the loops of war and reprisal, and reducing the sunk costs imposed on third countries and future generations.
Dower’s importance also lies in providing a more candid vocabulary for how the “international community” narrates itself. For example, when we speak of “national security,” world ethics asks: does your security come at the expense of others’ insecurity? When we say “sovereign equality,” it asks: in policy domains with massive global externalities, must sovereignty be bound to corresponding cross-border responsibilities? When we say “the right to development,” it asks: is development defined as expanding human capabilities and opportunities, or merely raising average GDP? These are not conduct grades; they are a way to restore verifiability to political language—to break macro goals back down into “measurable reductions of suffering and verifiable enhancements of capability.” This is precisely Dower’s consistent method: anchoring normative disputes in comparative assessments within specific problem domains, rather than tugging at adjectives.
For today’s policy practice, Dower’s thought offers at least four executable prompts. First, turn global citizenship from an “attitude” into an “institution”: establish, in education and public finance, principles of obligation toward strangers—for example, through long-term commitments to cross-border poverty reduction, pandemic funds, refugee resettlement, and climate adaptation—so that sympathy is converted into budgets and rules. Second, reprice the opportunity costs of armaments and the arms trade: when arms races devour resources that could extend life and mitigate risk, political leaders must publicly account for “who went untreated, who lost schooling, who stood exposed on the disaster front line” as a result—cosmopolitan pacificism requires that this become part of democratic accountability. Third, strengthen “direct protection of persons” in international law: advance independent mechanisms of investigation, prosecution, and reparation, to minimize situations in which the “name of the state” obscures the individual. Fourth, treat the intersection of environment and human rights as the main battlefield of global justice: set “ecological integrity—human rights—equitable development—peace” as simultaneous equations, not offsets.
For readers in China and the broader “global South,” Dower’s value lies in providing a universalist framework that is participatory, debatable, and revisable—rather than a binary of “either wholly accept Western discourse or reject it outright.” World ethics is not about “whose values are higher,” but about “who is willing to make the reduction of suffering a shared goal and to accept auditable burden-sharing to that end.” In this sense, World Ethics: The New Agenda (《世界伦理：新的议程》) has endured not because it is a proselytizing pamphlet, but because it places opposing positions at the same table for repeated rehearsal, requiring each to justify its prescriptions for poverty, the environment, war, and global governance with reasons that can cross borders.
Readers may ask why I am willing to vouch for Dower. The answer is simple: he turns the baseline of “treating persons as persons” into operational standards for transnational policy. He neither romanticizes world order nor curses realpolitik; he simply insists that every decision facing the world must answer two plain questions: does it reduce suffering in a quantifiable sense? does it expand human capabilities in a verifiable sense? These two questions demand, on the one hand, that in a high-intensity conflict like the Russia–Ukraine war we respect the legitimacy of self-defense and resistance to aggression while treating the shortening of war’s lifespan and postwar reconstruction as equally important ethical aims; on the other hand, they require us to treat the chronic pain points of climate, poverty, disease, and displacement as components of a “peace project.” Cosmopolitanism does not demand that you “love everyone”; it asks you to acknowledge institutionally that the suffering of strangers is related to you, and that this “relatedness” must leave traces in budgets and rules. Dower’s contribution is to provide a checklist that all parties intervening in war within real-world politics can implement.