  Egalitarian justice doctrines rest on the fundamental premise that all persons have the same fundamental worth and dignity, which commands respect. An aristocratic doctrine that held that all lords are inherently superior to commoners and hence ought to have greater rights and privileges would reject the basic equal human worth premise. However, acceptance of this fundamental or background egalitarian premise need not per se commit one to any very substantive egalitarian ethic. Accepting basic equal human worth, one might cheerfully maintain that the correct ethic is egoism, that each person ought to strive to bring about her own advantage as best she can. Or one might hold that there is no moral requirement that the inhabitants of a political community should share equally in political power or political rights, and no moral requirement that people who happen to become better off should help the worse off.