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drethelin comments on Against utility functions - Less Wrong
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On the one hand, you are correct regarding philosophy for humans: we do ethics and meta-ethics to reduce our uncertainty about our utility functions, not as a kind of game-tree planning based on already knowing those functions.
On the other hand, the Von-Neumann-Morgenstern Theorem says blah blah blah blah.
On the third hand, if you have a mathematical structure we can use to make no-Dutch-book decisions that better models the kinds of uncertainty we deal with as embodied human beings in real life, I'm all ears.
I don't think Dutch book arguments matter in practice. An easy way to avoid being Dutch booked is to refuse bets being offered to you by people you don't trust.
Not that I fully support utility functions as a useful concept, but having a consistent one also keeps you from dutch booking yourself. You can interpret any decision as a bet using utility and people often make decisions that cost them effort and energy but leave them in the same place where they started. So it's possible trying to figure out one's utility function can help prevent eg anxious looping behavior.
Sure, if you're right about your utility function. The failure mode I'm worried about is people believing they know what their utility function is and being wrong, maybe disastrously wrong. Consistency is not a virtue if, in reaching for consistency, you make yourself consistent in the wrong direction. Inconsistency can be a hedge against making extremely bad decisions.