Ethics is divided into three subfield: meta-ethics, normative ethics and applied ethics. Meta-ethics addresses what moral language means, this is where debates over moral realism, motivational internalism, and moral cognitivism take place. Normative ethics involves general theories of how we should act, utilitarianism, Kantianism, particularism, virtue ethics etc. Applied ethics involves debates over particular moral issues: abortion, euthanasia, performance enhancing drugs etc.
And most people who claim to follow some sort of morality in the real world would care little or not at all about these subdivisions. Sure, you could pidgeon-hole some of them as “moral absolutists”, and others as following a “divine command theory”. But really, most people’s morality is constantly informed by ethical debates and disputes, so even that is not quite right. Needless to say, these debates largely occur in the public sphere, not academic philosophy departments.
Conflating “morality” and “ethics” would leave you with no way to draw a distinction between what these common folks are thinking about when they reason “morally”, vs. what goes on in broader ethical (and political) debates, both within academic philosophy and outside of it. This would seem to be a rather critical failure of rationality.
They’re not “different things”, in that public ethical debate (plus of course legal, civic and political debate as well) is often a matter of judging and balancing disputes between previously existing “rights”. Moreover, inner morality, public ethics and moral philosophy all address the same basic topic of “how we should live”. But this is not to say that either “morality” or “ethics” mean nothing more than “How should we live?”. Indeed, you have previously referred to ethics as ‘the… stud[y of] moral questions’, implying some sort of rigorous inquiry. Conversely, philosophers routinely talk about “descriptive morality” when they need to refer to moral values or socially-endorsed moral codes as they actually exist in the real world without endorsing them normatively.
And most people who claim to follow some sort of morality in the real world would care little or not at all about these subdivisions. Sure, you could pidgeon-hole some of them as “moral absolutists”, and others as following a “divine command theory”. But really, most people’s morality is constantly informed by ethical debates and disputes, so even that is not quite right. Needless to say, these debates largely occur in the public sphere, not academic philosophy departments.
Conflating “morality” and “ethics” would leave you with no way to draw a distinction between what these common folks are thinking about when they reason “morally”, vs. what goes on in broader ethical (and political) debates, both within academic philosophy and outside of it. This would seem to be a rather critical failure of rationality.
Why should we think that what common folks are reasoning about and what gets argued about in the public sphere are different things?
They’re not “different things”, in that public ethical debate (plus of course legal, civic and political debate as well) is often a matter of judging and balancing disputes between previously existing “rights”. Moreover, inner morality, public ethics and moral philosophy all address the same basic topic of “how we should live”. But this is not to say that either “morality” or “ethics” mean nothing more than “How should we live?”. Indeed, you have previously referred to ethics as ‘the… stud[y of] moral questions’, implying some sort of rigorous inquiry. Conversely, philosophers routinely talk about “descriptive morality” when they need to refer to moral values or socially-endorsed moral codes as they actually exist in the real world without endorsing them normatively.