People who say such things seem to think that abstraction and reduction to components inherently carry a moral valence. They don't. People think that if you thi

People who say such things seem to think that abstraction and reduction to components inherently carry a moral valence. They don't. People think that if you think of love as a chemical reaction it must mean that you think it has no value. I think that it only shows their narrowminded arrogance in thinking that chemical reactions can have no value. One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens and all that. We all take on different points of view depending on what's most useful at the time, and what patterns of thought come naturally to us. If you're a specific type of person, it's useful and natural to think of people as a system to be optimized. And if you love the people you're modeling, what you're optimizing for is their happiness and dignity. But some people can't conceive of this being the case. They see someone saying sciency words about mushy feelingy topics and pattern-match to the first supervillain they can think of. "People are just atoms, I guess that means I can blow you all up! Mwahahahaha!" Perhaps the people who wrote that supervillain never studied refraction and realized that it made rainbows more beautiful, not less. But probably they just didn't care. They needed a flimsy excuse to justify the awesome fight scenes they wanted to write. And that's all the reader was looking for too, It doesn't take much to let someone suspend their disbelief.