Armed conflict and every decision to deploy wmd of

armed conflict and every decision to deploy WMD
, of whatever type,
must be considered within the full
context of other relevant actors, agencies, and term strategies or results
,12
a pragmatist perspective is
unlikely to result in the kind of abstract thinking that antiwar feminism criticizes in dominant just war
and realist approaches.
13
Feminism also shares pragmatism's rejection of traditional rationalist and empiricist approaches and its
commitment to the inseparability of theory and practice.
14
Both believe that reason must be grounded in
experience and requires being supplemented
, at least in particular circumstances,
by emotion.
15 In this respect,
feminists also favor a posteriori rather than a priori forms of knowledge, those that develop on the basis
of experience rather than those that are posited prior to it.
16
In sum,
both pragmatism and feminism accord a central place to the particular, the concrete, and the
factual elements of experience, as opposed to the universal, the generalizable, and the abstract.
17 This
opposition to abstraction is apparent, for example, in feminist understandings of women's "different voice" and Dewey's views about the
importance of the qualitative background of situations. In contrast to mainstream philosophy,
both feminist and pragmatist
perspectives focus on everyday life and emphasize respect for others and the constitutiveness of
community. The pragmatists' sensitivity to the social embeddedness of persons led them to understand
the "I" "only in relation to other selves, so that the autonomy of individual agents needed to be
integrated with their status as social beings" existing in community.
18
This common conception of the "relational self" suggests that both pragmatists and feminists will resist
turning others into "the Other," who can then be demonized and made into "the enemy," suitable to be
killed. The feminist commitment to the well-being of others
, in both the local and the global community, is well illustrated
by Carol Cohn's and Sara Ruddick's contribution to this volume. However, this commitment also
provides the basis for the
pragmatist feminist position articulated here that refuses to categorically rule out the moral legitimacy of
any resort to armed force or war, since such resort may be morally imperative to protect innocent
others.
In addition to these marked similarities,
it is also important to acknowledge how a pragmatist feminism differs
significantly
from American Pragmatism.
Perhaps
most important is pragmatist feminism's attention to the
gendered character of the social world and gender's impact on the formation and maintenance of male
and female identities. These subjects
largely were ignored by the American Pragmatists19 but
influence the analysis of
the ethics of WMD
outlined here. In addition,
feminists tend to give greater import to the cognitive aspects of
affect than pragmatists
, even though, as already discussed, pragmatists recognize the importance of emotions to agency and cognition.