The nice thing about making distinctions that one does as it wants.
It is possible to distinguish between two types of moral: on the one hand, we can establish the moral individual, where what is essential to establish what is good or bad, commendable or reprehensible aspect of an action has to do with internal aspects of the person, for example their intentions. or their justifications. They are moral that they work with a single person, and even when applied in social situations, what matters for the evaluation of the action is only the attitudes of the actor. All virtue ethics is ultimately a moral individual: the person is a criterion of personal action, and what is central is to see how each action is related to said canon. In any case, ethics is here a criterion for the internal action that will guide each individual.
On the other hand, we can think of the morals of society, where what’s fundamental about the morality of an action is the reaction of the other person. Here the moral is something that is intrinsically social, and cannot be qualify morally the actions of lonely people. Several of the changes in regard to the moral in contemporary societies can be interpreted in this logic. The growing importance of the criterion of consent (consent, capacity to give consent) to assess the morality of various actions is a sample of it. Because a morality of consent is a morality that does not depend on the value of the action of the reaction of the other: The sin central here is not respect and violate the consent of another. Here the ethics, then, has to do with criteria to guide the social relations.
What is the possible relevance of the above distinction? An interesting topic is that those that use one of these logics have problems to understand the other logic. And in particular, thinking now in empirical terms, one can argue that the moral tradition in Chile was a moral individual (a moral virtue), while the moral modern liberal that is unfolding is a social morality (and in particular, to a morality of consent). The case of sexual morality is perhaps the most clear about it. On the one hand, you lose all notion of individual virtue on the subject, and it is thought that, in principle, any action is valid as long as there is consent, while for the traditional morality, there are actions that per se are immoral. And on the other hand, increases the rejection of moral behaviors that undermine a morality of consent (pedophilia and rape in general).
Now, a social morality as consent when it is looked at from the logic of a moral individual it is a little understandable. Because it has no moral criteria for what a moral individual is the central, criteria around defining the behaviors of the own individual separate way. For a moral individual, a social morality appears as amorality pure, as a lack of boundaries. The above is not correct, but the criteria and limits -which in fact can work just as absolutely as you want – existing operate in another sphere.
And therefore, as a way of making visible the moral criteria of a social ethic for people who follow individual moral is that the distinction may have some relevance.