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The present Minister for Social Affairs and Pensions in Belgium, Frank Vandenbroucke, has brought a mix of economics and political philosophy to bear on the debate about the renewal of social democracy, in his recent dissertation Social Justice and Individual Ethics in an Open Society: Equality, Responsibility and Incentives (Vandenbroucke, 1999a). The first three chapters of this remarkable work spell out an abstract model of social policy, which is also highly relevant to the ongoing debate on basic income. This paper will identify and critically discuss some novel elements in Vandenbroucke’s model, elements which pose a principled challenge to those, like ourselves, who have argued that a basic income, pitched at its maximally feasible (or at least at a substantial) level, is the most desirable policy from the point of view of egalitarian social justice. In a nutshell, Vandenbroucke’s challenge consists of the following two claims. First, while maximum basic income may be among social policies that optimally implement principles of egalitarian justice, one can not rule out that redistributive policies of wage subsidization, or more generally a mix of basic income and wage subsidies, may optimally serve such principles as well. In consequence of this, an egalitarian government may have to choose from among a (possibly large) set of optimal policies on grounds extraneous to egalitarian justice. In particular, and this is Vandenbroucke’s second claim, such a government may have to select the just-responsibility-sensitive egalitarian-policy which it can also best defend as capturing the society’s favored conception of the good life, inasmuch as the good …