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Leonhart comments on Against utility functions - Less Wrong Discussion
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It may well do. Yvain has pointed out on his blog (I recall the post, though I couldn't find it just now) that in daily life we do actually use something like utilitarianism quite a bit, which carries a presumption of something like a utility function at least in that case. But what works in normal ranges does not necessarily extrapolate: utilitarianism is observably brittle, and routinely reaches conclusions that humans consider absurd.
There's occasionally LW posts showing that utilitarianism gives some apparently-absurd result or other, and too often the poster seems to be saying "look, absurd result, but the numbers work out so this is important!" rather than "oh, I hit an absurdity, perhaps I'm stretching this way further than it goes." It's entirely unclear to me that pretending you're an agent with a utility function is actually a good idea; it seems to me to be setting yourself up to fall into absurdities.
Below, you claim this is a moral choice; I would suggest that trying to achieve an actually impossible moral code, let alone advocating it, is basically unhealthy.
Firstly, I thought we were just appealing to consequentialism, not utilitarianism?
So I think I agree with you that believing you have a utility function if you in fact don't might suck, and that baseline humans in fact don't. I was trying to distinguish that from:
a) believing one ought to have a utility function, in which case I might seek to self-modify appropriately if it became possible; so something a bit stronger than the "pretending" you suggested.
b) believing one should strive to act as if one did, while knowing that I'll fall short because I don't.
The second you addressed by saying
Did you have the same position re. Trying to Try?
I have one group of intuitions here that claim impossibility in a moral code is a feature, not a bug, because it helps avoid deluding youself that you've finished the job and are now perfect; and why would I expect the right action to be healthy anyway? But this seems like a line of thinking that is specific to coping with being an inconsistent human, in the absence of an engineering fix for that.