 Simmons (2001) has a different response to Wolff. Simmons draws a distinction between the moral justification of states and the political legitimacy of a particular, historically realized, state and its directives. According to Simmons, the state’s justification depends on its moral defensibility. If it can successfully be shown that having a state is morally better than not having a state (Simmons 2001: 125), the state is justified. But moral justification is only necessary, not sufficient, for political legitimacy, according to Simmons. The reason is that our moral obligations are to everyone, including citizens of other states, not to the particular state we live in. A particular state’s legitimacy, understood as the capacity to generate and enforce a duty to obey, depends on citizens’ actual consent. While there is no general moral duty to obey the particular state we live in, we may have a political obligation to obey if we have given our prior consent to this state. The absence of a general moral duty to obey the state thus does not imply that all states are necessarily illegitimate (Simmons 2001: 137).