Coming to terms with the non-morality of nature: the distance and compatibility between natural laws and ethics.

This honest admission [by Darwin] — that nature is often (by our standards) cruel and that all previous attempts to find a lurking goodness behind everything represent just so much special pleading — can lead in two directions. One might retain the principle that nature holds moral messages, but reverse the usual perspective and claim that morality consists in understanding the ways of nature and doing the opposite….

The other argument, radical in Darwin’s day but more familiar now, holds that nature simply is as we find it. Our failure to discern a universal good does not record any lack of insight or ingenuity, but merely demonstrates that nature contains no moral messages framed in human terms. Morality is a subject for philosophers, theologians, students of the humanities, indeed for all thinking people. The answers will not be read passively from nature; they do not, and cannot, arise from the data of science. The factual state of the world does not teach us how we, with our powers for good and evil, should alter or preserve it in the most ethical manner.

Darwin himself tended toward this view, although he could not, as a man of his time, thoroughly abandon the idea that laws of nature might reflect some higher purpose. He clearly recognized that the specific manifestations of those laws — cats playing with mice, and ichneumon larvae eating caterpillars — could not embody ethical messages, but he somehow hoped that unknown higher laws might exist “with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.”

Stephen Jay Gould, “Nonmoral Nature”

See here for another post on this theme.