Ethics as such draws no conclusions about right and wrong about abortion, homosexuality, war, or virtue. Ethics tell us only what the philosophers and theologians who engage in ethical inquiry think and believe about morality. People have moral beliefs and sometimes live in accordance with them, and sometimes they do not. They do some things because they believe they are right with out necessary reference to consequences and do other things because they believe they will accomplish more good than alternative courses of action. In other words, they act for deontological and teleological reasons, but most have never heard of those words and have little sophistication about ethical theory as it is practiced by the specialists.
People act on the beliefs they have acquired over a lifetime.
Philosophers and theologians become technical experts in the history, language, and methods of ethics as a formal discipline with its many schools of thought. But they are still people who, equipped with the tools of the trade, work out their own systems of thought and make pronouncements about right and wrong. They incarnate their own thought into the formal schemes they adopt. Ethics, however, does not tell them what is virtuous, just, and good. They specify that in the formal theories they appropriate or create as experts who know how to give precision and systematic expression to their judgments.