Abstract

In his lecture “Must Morality have an Object?” Frankena, among other things, tries to distinguish between the moral and the nonmoral domain. People within the former may act morally rightly as well as wrongly. None of them are innocent. They all have eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. “Moralmaid” is Frankena's name of a typical representative of this domain. Whether she tries to act rightly or wrongly is an open question. “Lover-boy” is Frankena's name of one of the more interesting representatives of the nonmoral domain. He is a person who many of us would maintain belongs to the moral domain, but Frankena denies this. Since Frankena sees him as an important test case, he conducts his discussion of how to distinguish between the moral and the nonmoral domain partly in terms of the distinction between moralmaid and loverboy. I shall follow him in this.