Why? I’m not trying to rely on SEP as an authority here. Indeed, given your own findings about how the terms are used in the philosophical literature, no such authority could plausibly exist.
What I can hope to show is that my use of the terms is more meaningful than others’ (it “carves concept-space at its joints”) and that it’s at least roughly consistent with what English speakers mean when they talk about “morality” and “ethics”. AFAICT, the SEP entry supports my argument: it exemplifies a meaningful distinction between “descriptive” and “normative” morality, which most English-speaking folks would readily describe as a distinction between “morality” and “ethics”.
I don’t use these terms because they have undesirable connotations and are unfamiliar to most English speakers. Calling morality as it is actually reasoned about in the real world “descriptive” only makes sense as a way of emphasizing that you seek to describe something as opposed to endorsing it. OK for philosophers (and folks working on CEV, perhaps), not so much for everyone else.
It does not really help your case to simultaneously lean on SEP as an authority and claim that it is wrong.
Why? I’m not trying to rely on SEP as an authority here. Indeed, given your own findings about how the terms are used in the philosophical literature, no such authority could plausibly exist.
What I can hope to show is that my use of the terms is more meaningful than others’ (it “carves concept-space at its joints”) and that it’s at least roughly consistent with what English speakers mean when they talk about “morality” and “ethics”. AFAICT, the SEP entry supports my argument: it exemplifies a meaningful distinction between “descriptive” and “normative” morality, which most English-speaking folks would readily describe as a distinction between “morality” and “ethics”.
Then it was a particularly bad choice as a response when asked for an authoritative source.
Then just use “descriptive” and “normative”… The concept space is already carved the way you like it, get your hand out of the cake.
I don’t use these terms because they have undesirable connotations and are unfamiliar to most English speakers. Calling morality as it is actually reasoned about in the real world “descriptive” only makes sense as a way of emphasizing that you seek to describe something as opposed to endorsing it. OK for philosophers (and folks working on CEV, perhaps), not so much for everyone else.