One of the most powerful critiques of unconditional social protection programs, such as universal basic income, is that they violate reciprocity in distributive justice: the idea that it is unjust for someone to draw benefits from the social product without contributing back. In this paper, I provide an argument in favour of unconditionality within social protection programs that accepts the principle of reciprocity but that denies that the state has the epistemic competence to make comprehensive judgments about reciprocity. This argument depends on two core premises. First, I maintain that the social product should be understood as the set of combined capabilities in a society and contributing to that product consists in capability-promoting behaviour. Second, I develop a distinction between the ethical and political senses of conditionality with respect to reciprocity and social protection programs. Ethical conditionality recognizes that it is sometimes appropriate for community members to form moral judgments about what reciprocity might demand from recipients of social benefits. But it does not follow that ethical conditionality should give rise to political conditionality: I argue that it is inappropriate for the state to become the arbiter and enforcer of judgments about ethical conditionality with respect to social protection programs. Bureaucratic processes are often marred by different forms of epistemic injustice that preclude the recognition of a large subset of capability-promoting activities within a community; but even if the state was epistemically just, it would still be inappropriate for it to enforce these activities because of the constitutive nature of freedom within capabilities.