 Firstly, for pantheism, there is no higher power, no external authority to tell us what to do. Insofar as it rejects any sense of a transcendent external lawgiver or—to put the matter more positively—insofar as it regards deity as the distributed possession of all, pantheism may be represented as endorsing the Kantian doctrine of the autonomy of ethical judgement. But the implications of this are open. It can lead to either democratic communitarian ethics or to individualism. Paradoxically, it might equally well result in a species of conservative conformity to whatever is deemed to be the ‘natural state’ of the world every bit as stifling to the human spirit as conformity to whatever is deemed to be ‘the will of God.’