The “particularity requirement” was first given its name by A. John Simmons, though as Simmons rightly points out it has long been present, though unnamed, in the history of political philosophy. It is the requirement that a successful theory of political obligation must ground an obligation to comply with and support a citizen's own state – not an unconditional obligation, of course, but an obligation that is distinct from what one may owe to states in general, or, if our criterion is more selective, all those states that have some important and desirable feature. We can easily see that providing that ground may be problematic for approaches that take off from some cosmopolitan idea such as natural duty: if, after all, it is one's human nature itself that generates obligations, it will be an uphill battle to explain why there should be any sort of special moral bond arising from the contingencies of membership – and perhaps, according to “philosophical anarchists” (a label adopted by Simmons and others), a losing battle too, for even a successful argument that states were good things to have, from a cosmopolitan standpoint, would not amount to an argument that a person had a reason to support a particular state. (That it was “theirs” would of course be question-begging, or, to employ Godwin's term, “magical.”)

Other approaches, however, seem on the face of things to have a better chance of meeting the requirement.