'Ethical' is quite a good term for what you mean, and in my experience there is another medium sized group of people who specifically contrast morals and ethics.
Personally I'm a fairly strict Utilitarian, so I don't have a concept of 'real right and wrong' other than 'what does the greatest good to the greatest number', and would usually talk about it in those terms: 'giving to cost effective charities is a good way of increasing the amount of happiness in the world' rather than 'giving to cost effective charities is moral/ethical'.
I'm also a Christian, so I could (much less usefully) define 'real right and wrong' as 'obeying or disobeying God's will'. Like most other Anglicans I believe we discern God's will by looking at scripture, reason and tradition. For me (and for many others who describe themselves as liberal Christians), 'reason' has primacy, and is the light by which the others are interpreted. So if something in scripture or tradition is unreasonable (and my Utilitarian principles tell me that an ethical system which causes more misery than happiness is unreasonable) then it is necessary to interpret it differently or to abandon it.
I have lots of secular atheist friends, by contrast, whose morality does seem to be based on what other people tell them and not on rational grounds. One example of this is what Peter Singer would call 'speciesism', the idea that its vastly more important to alleviate human suffering than it is to alleviate the suffering of other animals, because humans are more intelligent,* and yet it's monstrous to care more about the suffering of more intelligent humans than of less intelligent humans.
* Not because some humans are more capable of suffering than some animals. That, of course, is perfectly rational.
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Personally I'm a fairly strict Utilitarian, so I don't have a concept of 'real right and wrong' other than 'what does the greatest good to the greatest number', and would usually talk about it in those terms: 'giving to cost effective charities is a good way of increasing the amount of happiness in the world' rather than 'giving to cost effective charities is moral/ethical'.
I'm also a Christian, so I could (much less usefully) define 'real right and wrong' as 'obeying or disobeying God's will'. Like most other Anglicans I believe we discern God's will by looking at scripture, reason and tradition. For me (and for many others who describe themselves as liberal Christians), 'reason' has primacy, and is the light by which the others are interpreted. So if something in scripture or tradition is unreasonable (and my Utilitarian principles tell me that an ethical system which causes more misery than happiness is unreasonable) then it is necessary to interpret it differently or to abandon it.
I have lots of secular atheist friends, by contrast, whose morality does seem to be based on what other people tell them and not on rational grounds. One example of this is what Peter Singer would call 'speciesism', the idea that its vastly more important to alleviate human suffering than it is to alleviate the suffering of other animals, because humans are more intelligent,* and yet it's monstrous to care more about the suffering of more intelligent humans than of less intelligent humans.
* Not because some humans are more capable of suffering than some animals. That, of course, is perfectly rational.