"Deontologists are just elevating intermediate heuristics to terminal values" is true, but also misleading and unfair unless you prepend "Consequentialists and " first. After all, it seems quite likely that joy, curiosity, love, and all the other things we value are also merely heuristics that evolution found to be useful for its terminal goal of "Make more mans. More mans!" But if our terminal values happen to match some other optimizing process' instrumental values, so what? That's an interesting observation, not a devastating criticism.