Preface: If all you are talking about is the non-technical or vernacular use of
ethics and
morality, well, that's sort of an empirical question and I'll freely give you that one, because it doesn't really matter to me. In the vernacular "per se" often means "precisely", and I don't care about that, either.
The professional ethics example is merely an example of the distinction between normative ethics and applied ethics. And you know what? Applied ethics is a
subset of normative ethics. That is, it is the application of normative ethical systems to the situations that are typical of or distinctive of particular broad categories, such business ethics, medical ethics, and legal ethics.
That isn't to say that the study of medical ethics supervenes upon normative ethics while normative ethics is entirely independent of medical ethics. No, the particular ethical questions that arise within applied ethics are often used to show the success or unfeasibility of a normative system in application.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy wrote:
The term “morality” can be used either
1.descriptively to refer to some codes of conduct put forward by a society or,
a. some other group, such as a religion, or
b. accepted by an individual for her own behavior or
The descriptive use of morality covers both personal rules (what you called morals) and group rules (what you called ethics).
However, that's
descriptive. We're talking about right and wrong, good and evil, so we're in the realm of normative discourse, which means we have to use the normative sense of morality.
2.normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.
...
When “morality” is used in its universal normative sense, it need not have either of the two formal features that are essential to moralities referred to by the original descriptive sense: that it be a code of conduct that is put forward by a society and that it be accepted as a guide to behavior by the members of that society. Indeed, it is possible that “morality” in the normative sense has never been put forward by any particular society, by any group at all, or even by any individual that holds that moral rules should never be violated for non-moral reasons. “Morality” is thus an ambiguous word; the two essential formal features cited above, which are present in everything that is referred to by the original descriptive sense may not be present when “morality” is used in its normative sense. The only feature that the descriptive and normative senses of “morality” have in common is that they refer to guides to behavior that involve, at least in part, avoiding and preventing harm to some others.
This sort of morality is that to which philosophers refer when they speak of
ethics.
All ethical systems are moral systems, be they utilitarian, Kantian, expressivist, virtue-based, or any other variation on consequentialism, deontology, or the like. They all are based on rational assent to one or more principles.
Hedonistic Utilitarianism asserts that all rational persons would assent to having their conduct governed by the maximization of pleasure across all persons. Kantian ethics asserts that all rational persons must value rationality above all else and act so as to honor rationality (however that honoring is cashed out). Even modern metaethical theories do this; for example, Korsgaard's deontological constructivism holds that all rational entities
qua rational must have certain opinions, and these constitutive opinions include a modified version of the Kantian Categorical Imperative.
Morality (in the normative sense)
just is ethics.
But why can we have the case where legal ethics requires an action that one might consider immoral? It's actually really straightforward. It's called a moral dilemma, something which features rather often in discussion of ethical philosophy.
Ethicists have called situations like these moral dilemmas. The crucial features of a moral dilemma are these: the agent is required to do each of two (or more) actions; the agent can do each of the actions; but the agent cannot do both (or all) of the actions. The agent thus seems condemned to moral failure; no matter what she does, she will do something wrong (or fail to do something that she ought to do).
This sort of thing can arise within an ethical system, such as how Kantian morality admits of situations where we must choose between respecting autonomy and following a universal law. However, much more commonly we run into dilemmas derived from the interaction of multiple moralities. That is the category to which the legal ethics example belongs:
Another issue raised by the topic of moral dilemmas is the relationship among various parts of morality. Consider this distinction. General obligations are moral requirements that individuals have simply because they are moral agents. That agents are required not to kill, not to steal, and not to assault are examples of general obligations. Agency alone makes these precepts applicable to individuals. By contrast, role-related obligations are moral requirements that agents have in virtue of their role, occupation, or position in society. That lifeguards are required to save swimmers in distress is a role-related obligation. Another example, mentioned earlier, is the obligation of a defense attorney to hold in confidence the disclosures made by a client. These categories need not be exclusive. It is likely that anyone who is in a position to do so ought to save a drowning person. And if a person has particularly sensitive information about another, she should probably not reveal it to third parties regardless of how the information was obtained. But lifeguards have obligations to help swimmers in distress when most others do not because of their abilities and contractual commitments. And lawyers have special obligations of confidentiality to their clients because of implicit promises and the need to maintain trust.
