Ethical naturalism and moral naturalism

Question

This article (Shook, 2015) makes a distinction between "ethical naturalism" and "moral naturalism":

Moral naturalism as defined at the conclusion of the previous section is distinct from both ethical naturalism and moral realism. Ethics is the philosophical domain that deals with meta‐level issues about ways for determining the meanings and applicability of moral norms and terms, questions about the appropriate methods for judging and answering moral problems, and concerns over whether better moralities, or even one correct morality, can be determined. Ethical naturalism therefore goes much further than moral naturalism, by not only agreeing that actual morality should be studied naturalistically, but additionally claiming that all those meta‐level issues are questions to be answered by empirical sciences as well. If successful, ethical naturalism would render moral nihilism, scepticism, subjectivism, and relativism all obsolete.

But according to Wikipedia, "ethical naturalism" and "moral naturalism" are synonymous:

Ethical naturalism (also called moral naturalism or naturalistic cognitivistic definism)1 is the meta-ethical view which claims that:

The SEP only wrote about "moral naturalism" (in this article, the term "ethical naturalism" appears only once).

Britannica only wrote about "ethical naturalism" (in this article, the term "moral naturalism" doesn't appear).

So I don't know if the SEP article, the Britannica article, and the Wikipedia article are talking about the same thing.

I also read on this website that ethics and moral philosophy are equivalent terms.

References:

Shook, J. R. (2015). Humanism, Moral Relativism, and Ethical Objectivity. The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism, 403-425.

Answer 1

Firstly, welcome to philosophy, a field of study plagued and fuelled by ambiguity.

Your question begins 'This article makes a distinction...' so perhaps we should take that as a clue to suggest that a distinction between ethics and morals is one that can be manufactured to suit a given philosopher's purpose.

Anyway, it seems to me from your limited quotation that Shook is using the term morals to mean codes of behaviour, values etc, and ethics to mean the study of morals and the principles that should govern them.

In Brittanica you will find the statement 'Generally, the terms ethics and morality are used interchangeably', and they later say that most philosophers who study ethics consider the terms interchangeable. Having said that, they then base an entire article on the difference between the terms, the drift of which is that morals are more about personal behaviour and values while ethics are externally determined rules.

On another website, whose strapline includes the words 'academic rigour', you will find exactly the opposite distinction being made. They say that ethics refer to personal standards of behaviour, while morals refer to the standards of the community.

So my advice to you is to attach less weight to the words used to label different views and more weight to the views themselves.