Original Research Article Philosophy and Social Criticism 2021, Vol. 0(0) 1–21 © The Author(s) 2021 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/01914537211040568 journals.sagepub.com/home/psc The reasons of the unreasonable: Is political liberalism still an option? Benedetta Giovanola  Department of Political Sciences, Communication and International Relations, University of Macerata, Macerata, Italy; Department of Philosophy, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA Roberta Sala  Faculty of Philosophy, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy Abstract In this study, we claim that political liberalism, despite harsh criticism, is still the best option available for providing a just and stable society. However, we maintain that political liberalism needs to be revised so as to be justifiable from the perspective of not only the “reasonable” in a Rawlsian sense (that we define as “fully” reasonable) but also the ones whom Rawls labels as “unreasonable.” To support our claim, going beyond Rawls’s original account, we unpack the concept of unreasonableness and identify three different subsets that we label as the “partially reasonable,” the “non-reasonable,” and the “un- reasonable.” We argue that both the “fully” reasonable and the “partially reasonable” would be included into the constituency of public justification; more specifically, we claim that the latter would support liberal institutions out of their reasons: we define these reasons as mutually intelligible reasons and claim that they allow to acknowledge the importance of a convergence approach to public justification. As for the “non-reason- able” and “unreasonable,” we claim that they cannot be included in the constituency of public justification, but they nonetheless could be compliant with liberal institutions if political liberalism offers them some reasons to comply: here, we claim that political liberalism should include them through engagement and propose reasoning from con- jecture as an effecting way of offering reasons for compliance. In particular, we claim that through reasoning from conjecture, the “non-reasonable” could find conciliatory reasons to comply with liberal institutions on a stable base. With regard to the “unreasonable” in Corresponding author: Benedetta Giovanola, Department of Political Sciences, Communication and International Relation, University of Macerata, via Don Minzoni 22/A, Macerata 62100, Italy. Email: benedetta.giovanola@unimc.it