Morality and Rules

It appears some people have a belief in the existence of something called personal morality. I don't think something like that can exist. By personal morality, I mean people believe that it's possible to have a set of morals for oneself that is not to be applied to the rest of the world. To me, this issues from a misunderstanding of what morals are. I suppose this is technically a semantics argument, but I'm going to make it anyway. Morals require you to apply them to the world at large, otherwise they're just rules you make for yourself. I mean, I could say I never drink tomato juice. This is not a moral decision, and I don't see how it's any different from saying I won't have sex until I'm married, or I won't get an abortion.

Morals are standards of behavior that you judge people by, including yourself, but certainly not exclusively yourself. It's somewhat ridiculous to apply a separate standard to yourself and to other people, whether your standard for yourself is higher or lower than for others. Thus, personal morality is a set of rules that you choose to apply to yourself. But morality still doesn't fit completely in with this.

This is because the conditions for rules are very different from the conditions of morals. First, rules should be kept to a minimum, following the belief of Occam's Razor. Second rules are never ends in themselves. Here, my argument diverges from a purely semantics argument. I am saying that rules people set for themselves should not be an end in themselves. If they are, you're now applying a different standard of judgment to yourself than others. It is perhaps possible to argue that it's ok to have different standards of judgment for different people, and if anyone wishes to, feel free to make a comment. But it is counterintuitive to me to do so. Thus, rules must have a certain goal in mind when created.

Moreover, rules should be remade with relatively little difficulty. This is because the general expectation is that you will get smarter and wiser as you grow up. Thus if you feel you should change a rule you should. Thus, it doesn't make any sense to say "I won't have sex until I'm married" unless you're willing to say "People shouldn't have sex until they're married." In the future you'll be smarter and be able to rethink such a decision, so why would you restrict yourself unnecessarily. It is true that you won't always be smarter, thus it should take you maybe a few days of thought to reevaluate your rule to make sure you're not under duress or something similar. But then still, the rule that would make sense would be "I won't have sex without a prior decision to do so." That is, you won't just have it come to you unexpectedly.