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TheAncientGeek comments on Against utility functions - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
On the fourth hand, we do ethics and metaethics to extrapolate better ethics.
Yes, that's right. We lack knowledge of the total set of concerns which move us, and the ordering among those of which move us more. Had we total knowledge of this, we would have no need for any such thing as "ethics" or "meta-ethics", and would simply view our preferences and decision concerns in their full form, use our reason to transform them into a coherent ordering over possible worlds, and act according to that ordering. This sounds strange and alien because I'm using meta-language rather than object-language, but in real life it would mostly mean just having a perfectly noncontradictory way of weighing things like love or roller-skating or reading that would always output a definite way to end up happy and satisfied.
However, we were built by evolution rather than a benevolent mathematician-god, so instead we have various modes of thought-experiment and intuition-pump designed to help us reduce our uncertainty about our own nature.