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And I'm not exactly sure which word is supposed to represent which idea.  Good post Tuner.
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This dictionary entry does define "moral" as that which involves Right and Wrong, what is intrinsically just as opposed to what is *delared* just, and that which involves conscience.
However, similar entries give the same weight to "ethics," which in the dictionaries doesn't seem to mean anything very different from "morals."
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In business, we use "ethics" in the transitory sense:  Boeing's ethics, legal ethics, one's own set of ethics, etc.  Certainly Bill James uses "ethics" to refer to the smaller concept of "behavior that will reduce fallout from the community."  But that could just be his own use of the term.
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Every human being has a conscience - a little voice that tells him that he should jump into the river to help the drowning person, even when the natural-selection ROI does not benefit him mathematically.  
True and genuine altruism - behavior contradicted by natural selection - is coded into every human's conscience.  And those consciences mainly agree across cultures:  there is no culture in which people's consciences tell them to lie.
It's this inner voice that I think of when using the term "morality," but maybe you're right that society at large uses the term differently.
Thanks Tuner.