Yes yes I know language changes, but that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to be annoyed at a language trend that is damaging the ability to convey or even conceptualize information.
"Prison labor is a form of legalized slavery and that is bad." 
"That's just morals. To each their own." 
The implication of "morals" as a summary of ethical and philosophical discourse tends to lead to such "morals" being dismissed as irrelevant or even irrational because they can't be measured in a test tube in a laboratory environment (neither can the concept of logical positivism but that one gets a pass).
Less commonly but still in existence is this version that is used by right wingers for a different but still grating purpose.
"The problem with society today is there is not enough morals. That is why bad things happen. There needs to be more morals in the family and in the school." 
It's still a crude summary, but one with even less philosophical consistency, that takes the already crude idea of "morals" and turns it into some kind of currency of goodness that is measured between those that ostensibly have a lot of it 
and those that don't. 
Okay so maybe this helps you, but I came from a very similar place as you and yeah I agree that morality and ethics are just used to shut down further discussion. "I think its bad!" Conversation over.
The problem I want to argue isn't with morality and ethics but (as other people have pointed out) there is a problem with the way that morality is defined/commonly understood and we miss it because the problem isnt with morality, but the problem of splitting things into categories and then assigning a relative "value" to those categories. Its a direct descendent of bourgeois enlightenment philosophy, Christian conceptions of good and evil, and catalysed with a healthy dose of residual cultural puritanism. However, it is the primary way that most people define most things, as having a subject/object value relation, rather than a dialectical one. Things are in a good group, which is my accepted group, and the other group. This is popular way of constructing an argument because it completely ignores projection -- if I can imagine the other wants to kill me then I can justify killing the other, which short circuits human risk calculation.
IMO dialectical morality and philosophy doesn't get anywhere enough study and attention, so what you end up with is a bunch of leftists who can do dialectical materialism, but still view morality as an objective value relation. Or we get accused of it (purity tests) and we have no response because we don't understand the problem with the way the argument is framed.
In a nutshell, dialectical morality would be something more like "good and bad define each other." I get a lot of this from the Dao de Ching, but its effective because it allows us to critique other people's moral arguments by escaping the limitations that are causing people to reach shitty conclusions, while not abandoning ethics as one of the people with the most consistently ethical beliefs, surely a contradiction that shuts down all engagement as well. Also, there are times when something is clearly right/wrong so a mastery of many different forms of constructing an argument helps us to be on the right side at the end of our analysis. We also know that dialectics helps to make class analysis as well, so the more time we spend in that headspace, the more natural it becomes.
"Utilitons." Not even once.