The Questions I Didn't Ask
On regret, justification, and the questions that determine our answers.
I still think about agreeing to have my cat declawed in 2008.
His name was Li.
He lived to nearly eighteen years old.
And when I think about him now, I don’t think about skin and furniture saved from scratches and rips. I think about him waiting by the door when I got home from work, sleeping curled up against my chest through the night, chirping at birds through the window, and settling into all those little routines that became an unforgettable life shared with another being. He was so gentle, endlessly patient, and deeply loved.
I also remember believing I was making a responsible decision.
For a long time I thought my regret was informational ignorance—that I’d eventually learned enough about declawing to change my decision if given another chance.
That’s true, but it’s only part of it. The deeper regret didn’t come from learning new facts. It came from realizing something about the way I’d reached the decision in the first place.
I imagined declawing as exactly what the name suggested: removing claws.
It isn’t.
To keep the claw from growing back, the last bone of each toe is quite literally removed along with it. I didn’t know that, nor had I appreciated that recovery wasn’t simply healing from surgery. It was adapting to a permanent change in the structure of Li’s feet.
That isn’t to say every declawed cat goes on to suffer chronic pain or lasting complications. Some seem to adapt remarkably well.
Others develop gait changes, litter box aversion because digging becomes uncomfortable, reduced climbing, chronic tenderness, or arthritis later in life. Li’s arthritis in his later years may or may not have been influenced by the surgery. I honestly don’t know.
What I understand now is that I’d accepted a permanent intervention without fully appreciating either what it actually involved or the range of consequences that could follow.
I didn’t lack empathy—I loved Li. I wanted him to have the happiest, healthiest life I could give him, and I don’t look back and wonder whether that love was real. It was. If anything, that’s part of what made this realization so uncomfortable.
Loving someone doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve organized your reasoning around what matters most to them.
I also don’t think it’s accurate to say I chose convenience or furniture over my cat. That would’ve been a different failure, and it wasn’t mine.
The justification I accepted sounded thoughtful. The procedure is routine now. They use a laser. He’ll be asleep. Recovery will be quick. He’s an indoor kitty anyway, and of course we’ll take care of him, so he won’t need to defend himself. Before long, he won’t even know the difference.
None of those statements struck me as manipulative or dishonest. They sounded responsible because they were all true as far as they went. What I didn’t recognize, much less appreciate, was that a collection of true statements can still produce a deeply incomplete justification. They sounded complete.
I remember thinking through those points. I wasn’t simply deferring because someone else sounded confident. I examined the logic that was in front of me, found it internally coherent, and agreed with it.
I examined the process.
I didn’t examine the ethical weight of the decision itself.
Those aren’t the same thing.
The fact that a procedure has become safer doesn’t answer whether it should be done. The fact that someone heals well doesn’t tell us whether the loss was justified. Even the thought that he wouldn’t know the difference now feels strangely, horrifyingly revealing to me, because whether Li could consciously compare his life before and after was never the real question. It was whether I had adequately considered what I was choosing to permanently remove from him.
To be clear, none of this is an attempt to shift responsibility, or to imply that the decision was forced upon me. I participated in it willingly, and that means I’m responsible for my part in the consequences.
No, this isn’t about changing my opinion about declawing.
It’s about fundamentally overhauling my understanding of justification.
At the time, I believed I’d carefully evaluated the reasoning. In one sense I had. I could follow each step, and the logic seemed coherent.
The problem was that I never stepped back to ask whether the frame itself was complete. I accepted a chain of reasoning that seemed to answer every question I was asking without noticing that the most important questions weren’t actually inside it.
I’ve come to realize it’s a shockingly common mistake. Systemic, in fact.
Not necessarily because people are uncaring, but because reasoning has a way of feeling complete when it successfully answers the questions we’ve decided to ask.
If those questions are too narrow, the conclusion can feel remarkably solid while still missing something fundamental.
I recognize that pattern now because I see it practically everywhere.
In fact, it’s why I started writing here in the first place.
This Substack began with autism. I wanted to articulate and share a way of thinking that I felt was constantly being mischaracterized from the outside in. Behavioral observations and diagnostic criteria do matter. But they were never meant to become substitutes for understanding the internal cognitive structure—leaving the mind entirely outside the diagnostic frame. Once the proxy starts carrying the explanatory weight, it becomes surprisingly easy to mistake descriptions of behavior for explanations of mind.
And everybody is obsessed with AI these days, of course, but I often write about it here because it’s another prime example of the same systemic pattern. It’s easy to become impressed by fluent output because output is what we interact with. But fluent answers don’t tell us how they came to be, what constraints shaped them, or whether the system is actually managing relevance or merely performing what that management might look like. Performance answers one question. It doesn’t automatically answer the others.
Looking back, I understand that I wasn’t persuaded by cruelty. I was persuaded by evidence that the procedure itself had improved. Safer surgery, better recovery, safer anesthesia. Those are all genuine improvements, but they answer a different question from whether the intervention itself deserved my confidence. I think medicine, regulation, and public policy make this mistake more often than we realize. We become so focused on improving the process that we stop asking whether the thing we’re improving is itself sufficiently justified.
The uncomfortable part is that I don’t see those patterns only because they’re out there.
They’re in here too.
Li lived a long life filled with affection, play, safety, and companionship. I did everything I knew how to do to make his life rich and meaningful, and if I could live those eighteen years with him again, I’d do so in a heartbeat.
I’d also never declaw another cat.
Not because I know more facts than I did then, although I do, but because now, whenever a justification feels complete, I compel myself to wonder what had to be left outside the frame in order for it to seem that way.
Regret has become a reminder for me that love isn’t what guarantees integrity.
Love determines what we hope for.
Integrity determines whether we’re willing to question the reasoning that tells us we’ve achieved it. ∞
Hi Michael, its nice to be back on here and enjoy your writing again. I hope you are well.