Dealing with the ‘unreasonable’. Legitimacy and toleration beyond Rawls ISSN: 2037-5816

In this paper I question how to make liberal institutions agreeable by the so called‘unreasonable’. I start by recapitulating Rawls’s notion of the reasonable and, by contrast, of theunreasonable, with regard to both epistemological and normative implications; namely, I pointout how being reasonable implies being able – quoting Rawls – ‘to apply toleration tophilosophy’ and, conversely, how being unreasonable implies assuming one’s ‘philosophy’(truth, morals, religion and so on) has to be enforced. I discuss the way in which Rawls copeswith the unreasonable and I try to explain why I find it unsatisfactory.