Thank you for this excellent post. I read this primarily because I would like to use formal theories to aid my own decision-making about big, abstract decisions like what to do with my life and what charities to donate to, where the numbers are much more available than the emotional responses. In a way this didn't help at all: it only says anything about a situation where you start with a preference ordering. But in another way it helped immensely, of course, since I need to understand these fundamental concepts. It was really valuable to me that you were so careful about what these "utilities" really mean.