The VNM-stuff is about decision theory. The preference aggregation stuff is about moral philosophy. Those should be completely firewalled. There is no value to a superconcept that crosses that boundary.

But surely the intuition that value ought to be aggregated linearly across "possible outcomes" is related to the intuition that value ought to be aggregated linearly across "individuals"? I think it basically comes down to independence: how much something (a lottery over possible outcomes / a set of individuals) is valued should be independent of other things (other parts of the total probabilistic mixture over outcomes / other individuals who exist).

When framed this way, the two problems in decision theory and moral philosophy can be merged together as the question of "where should one draw the boundary between things that are valued independently?" and the general notion of "utility" as "representation of preference that can be evaluated on certain objects independently of others and then aggregated linearly" does seem to have value.