Bernard Williams' Ethics has put the distinction between morality and ethics back on the agenda, Williams making a swingeing attack on ‘morality’ as a sub-system of ethics, which has been misconceived as though it were the whole. His target is the kind of moral thinking which has been dominant in contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy, but beyond this has at least been immensely influential in the English-speaking world in general for the last two centuries. Perhaps the paradigm target of Williams' attack is Kant, but utilitarians are recognized as at least marginal members of the class (p. 178). These two schools together cover much of the mainstream.

‘Morality’ is characterized by its making obligation central: that someone ought to do something, or that something is a good thing to do, finds expression if it has moral relevance at all in someone's having an obligation to do some act. Williams points out how distortive this is of our moral experience. For one thing, this system has no place for acts of supererogation. We admire people for great acts of courage, or self-dedication, and all the more so just because they were under no obligation to do these (p. 179).

‘Morality’ is in fact a misguided Procrustean operation. But it is not an innocent error, an honest, even-handed attempt to make sense of our moral intuitions which happens to fall short in certain respects. It is motivated by its own moral vision, in terms of which it has its own reasons to delegitimate much of what it excludes.