Good and Evil

[Hatshepsut]

Does participation in dangerous sports go against this "objective moral imperative"?

Without raising an "objective moral imperative" (a term I've not heard before), we can state that extreme sports enthusiasts impose some costs on the broader society. They demand, as part of a "right to be free from discrimination," to be insured without paying higher premiums, forcing the rest of the insurance pool to subsidize the extra medical risks they take, which may well exceed those taken by street drug abusers, and to pay death benefits to survivors. Balanced against these costs is the fact that extreme sportspersons tend to be members of high-income households that pay more taxes, and perhaps the jobs and industries they create.

I would guess that cost/benefit or utility calculations are our best attempt at "objectivity" in morals, yet deciding what to include in a cost/benefit worksheet and what to leave out is a matter of judgment which can tip the results.

Furthermore, the motivation to do anything always involves emotions.  That was something Hume noted...  But this is not involving "an objective value judgement." ...Evidently, your idea of "rationality" includes more than bare reason, but also feelings.

But we've chosen to divide human thought into two categories, "reason" and "emotion," and declare only the former "rational." This decision about the taxonomy of thoughts was already long in effect by the 18th century and is taken for granted unconsciously today. We might ask why emotion, a thing generated by the brain, does not represent the results of any kind of objective calculation. Often feelings are eminently rational. When we feel fear, it's a fair bet that it's because we're in danger of some kind.

I will agree that "reason" is broader. The brain makes emotional calculations very quickly albeit based on partial information and with biases toward the welfare of self and kin. And emotion "thinks" only about certain things. The slower-moving reason can aim at almost any topic and reach a higher level of verbal abstraction. Yet is this grounds enough to exclude emotion from universe of rationality? I might lean toward Chad Wooter on this issue, adding that it's the simultaneous use of both reason and emotion that produces "rationality." Remove either one and we're in trouble: Emotionally disordered people don't behave in a rational manner, while folks who refuse to reason act in a petty, self-centered way.