What you are doing is ditching the name “morality” but then just explaining the same thing. Sure, most people see “morality” as a sort of absolute, objective type of thing. Many people even reject “utilitarianism” and “consequentalism” as not even about “morality”. Probably the reason that most people see it like that is because it is easier to just program every one to accept these things as ‘dogmas’ than it is to try to prove it with arguments referring to connections between means and ends. But at the root of morality is a nexus of means and ends, whether people understand that or not.
When I said that “morality” is just a set of guidelines, what I meant was that what “morality” impels you to do is generally what “suits [you]”, anyway. Why else would it evolve, considering that each of us are the “survival machines” of genes, things which are, as replicators, “selfish”? What the hell do they care about other people, anyway? Often, Dawkins says things like that we are “rebelling” against the “tyranny” of our “selfish genes” by enacting societies in which we care for the weak, help out the poor, care about what happens to strangers, et cetera. He claims, furthermore, that a society run on the principle of “darwinism” would be a “ruthless” place to live. What he is missing, of course, is that we do live in such a society! Why else does he assume that we got to this point? How else could we explain how we got here? A few quotations from Mises will suffice to give a much more plausible explanation of what is happening than the empty hypostatization that we randomly started rebelling against our ‘creators’ and created “morality” out of thin air.
First of all, the myth that, by caring for the ‘weak’ or ‘sickly’, we are “deteriorating” our ‘gene pool’, is pretty ridiculous. Letting people like that die would not be more ‘darwinian’ than what we are doing now. What people who make that argument are doing is just comparing people adjusted to one type of life to that of an other. But what makes one better than the other?
Second of all, the reason why we care about strangers, help people, feel compassion, have friendships with people, et cetera is because of the division of labor, because their gain is our gain and their loss is our loss. We do it for ourselves despite whatever most people say. Again, why else would it have appeared?
The result of seeing morality as a sort of absolute, objective type of thing is that you start to believe that you should be able to apply it to things other than what it was ‘designed’ to handle as input. For example, people often try to apply it is the question of how we should treat animals. We see wildly different and erratic views here probably because our morality is not meant to deal with these things. Our affinities with other mammals, like the fact that the structure of young making them look ‘cute’ is similar between us and other mammals, is one of the factors here; it makes people start to feel like these things are like other humans. What other explanation should we give for the unbelievable phenomenon of the people who say “yeah, I am a vegetarian; I eat fish sometimes, though”? Why the hell is fish not called “meat”? That happens simply because fish are so much different that us; we have barely any affinities with them; and these people want to still call themselves “vegetarians” although it is plain that they are eating animals, too, not just plants. A quotation from Mises basically ends this ridiculousness of people questioning whether animals have ‘rights’:
From that, it is easy to see that asking whether animals have ‘rights’ is a phantom question. They are not a part of the division of labor, they are just means, like any other thing. We only have two choices. Either we let them ‘go their own way’ or we coerce them into our processes of production. So how does it make sense to ask whether or not they have ‘rights’? ‘Rights’ are of the office of morality; and morality appeared because of society, which, in turn, appeared because division of labor is more productive than isolated labor and people were able to ‘discover’ this fact.
What makes this post so hard for me to write is that I basically agree with what you are saying. The only difference is that it appears that you are trying to be inflammatory and sensational. You are not discarding morality any more that Mises was discarding it. And you even admitted that you act like you care about morality and manners. Perhaps that is because you do?
What “make[s] morality true” for most people is that to keep society working well is consistent with their interests in the long term. What our moral sentiments are are short-hands; they are the conclusions of calculations of our subconsciousness regarding how we should treat others; they are advisements from our subconsciousness. But we have all sorts of subconscious calculations that we rely on; why is morality so special? Our emotions, and even our faculty of taste, are subconscious calculations, too. For example, on one hand, fear advises us to get out of whatever situation that we are in, and, on the other hand, taste advises us whether we should eat whatever we are tasting or not.
If “morality” just refers to the conclusions of the calculations of our subsconsciousness regarding how we should treat others, it is a psychological phenonenon. (Of course, praxeology tells us why it appeared; it appeared because treating people like that, based on the past experiences of our species in society, furthers our own interests.) But, if “morality” refers to more than that, refers to our doctrines of how to treat other people, based on conscious thought, it is a question that has an answer, one which we may figure out only if we heed the teachings of economics, among other things.
To ignore morality in the first sense and just listen to your ‘reason’ is as insane as ignoring your emotions or tastes and just listening to your ‘reason’, which is insane indeed. If you plan to ignore your moral sentiments and just rely on your reason, why not do that with taste? Maybe you should forget about how things taste; for, of course, those are just the dumb recommendations of your subconsciousness, a thing too erratic to trust! You should just do research in the natural sciences to see what is best for you and then ingest it, whatever sorts of reactions your subconsciousness has to your decisions.
You are just a part of a long tradition of people who elevate ‘reason’ to the highest of levels and put emotions, passions, and other advisements of your subconsciousness on the lowest:
But you are not ignoring “morality” in the second sense. You are embracing that indeed.