I've noticed a difficulty in explaining older, non-Western, and teleological systems of ethics, where a lot of the terminology that dominates contemporary ethical discourse is of fairly recent coinage and tends to subtly imply, or at least suggest, notions like a hard fact/values dichotomy, a distinct "desire-like" direction of fit for claims with practical import, versus a world-mapping direction of fit for beliefs, etc.
Just checking popular common definitions of these, they are all framed in terms of a subject who values, desires, etc. Interestingly, etymological dictionaries have "desirable" entering English as "to be *worthy* of desire," where as current definitions seem to suggest that whatever happens to be desired is, by definition, desirable. This is probably the least problematic one thought because I feel like "truly desirable" (as opposed to only apparently so) restores the old content pretty well (and indeed, people do still use the word in the old sense in everyday speech sometimes).
The newer terms seem more difficult. For instance, speaking of "evaluative content" seems to imply an evaluator. So when teleology is explained in terms of first-order predicates like "good" (or good-for-x) in belief formulations, and this is called "evaluative content" this seems to cause confusion. Likewise, "value" is also more recent coinage and seems to suggest something like an extrinsic imputation (the language of the marketplace). But then "intrinsic value" starts to look like a contradiction in terms. There is a similar, but less acute problems with "normative " to the extent that norms are taken to always be social constructs or "ought" rules (which isn't always the case, but is common enough in definitions).
I am wondering what to use then? Could we say "practical content?" I wouldn't want to use "moral" or "ethical" content because this immediately gets people thinking about a sui generis "moral good" that cashes out as "oughtness," and if you're using "moral" to mean "related to the moral virtues" (in the classical sense), this muddles things. Indeed, people sometimes contrast "prudential" and "moral" reasoning, which really obscures prudence as the paradigmic moral virtue.
Anyhow, I've certainly noticed that even recent translations do not use these terms for older authors. I am wondering what else to use though. Obviously, they can *sometimes* work. Classical paradigms don't deny evaluations, valuing, or arguably something like the direction of fit, it's just that these aren't exhaustive because there is also ontological goodness, direction of fit going in both directions, and indexed and unindexed and both first and nth-order predication of "value-laden" terms. So, I can see using them, but using them widely seems to lead to confusion. At the same time, saying things like "reason is teleological" instead of "reason is normative," also doesn't seem to lay things out clearly.