 The contemporary literature has developed Locke’s ideas in several ways. John Simmons (2001) uses them to argue that we should distinguish between the moral justification of states in general and the political legitimacy of actual states. I will come back to this point in section 3.3. Joseph Raz links legitimacy to the justification of political authority. According to Raz, political authority is just a special case of the more general concept of authority (1986, 1995, 2006). He defines authority in relation to a claim—of a person or an agency—to generate what he calls pre-emptive reasons. Such reasons replace other reasons for action that people might have. For example, if a teacher asks her students to do some homework, she expects her say-so to give the students reason to do the homework.