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mattnewport comments on The Preference Utilitarian’s Time Inconsistency Problem - Less Wrong
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This seems to provide an answer to the question you posed above.
Chickens have very little to offer me other than their tasty flesh and essentially no capacity to meaningfully threaten me which is why I don't take their preferences into account. If you're happy with lopsided deals then there's how you draw the line.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable position to take but it doesn't sound anything like utilitarianism to me.
Turns out, the best deals look a lot like maximizing weighted averages of the utilities of affected parties.
Well the weighting is really the crux of the issue. If you are proposing that weighting should reflect both what the affected parties can offer and what they can credibly threaten then I still don't think this sounds much like utilitarianism as usually defined. It sounds more like realpolitik / might-is-right.
I disagree. Certainly there are examples where the best deals do not look like maximizing weighted averages of the utilities of affected parties, and I gave one here. Are you aware of some argument that these kinds of situations are not likely in real life?
I also agree with mattnewport's point, BTW.