Today, I want to be writing my thesis

I think I have a good thesis topic picked out but I need to get it approved, I just hope it will be. *crosses fingers*

Thesis proposal (draft) follows:
Orson Scott Card’s Hierarchy of Foreignness and Xenotransplantation

Orson Scott Card, in his Ender’s Saga (primarily Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide and Children of the Mind), delineates four degrees of foreignness which can and should be invoked in analyzing xenotransplantation, most notably the use of baboon hearts.1 ‘ Utlannings are strangers from our own world. Framlings are strangers of our own species, but from another world. Ramen are strangers of another species, but capable of communication with us, capable of co-existence with humanity. Last are varelse: [strangers of another species with whom communication is impossible].’2 For a complete analysis I would add odjurs: those who are not rational in any meaningful way. One, simple, example of this is a slime mold; we cannot communicate with but not because something is lacking in the relationship (such as an inability to understand the language, social custom or inherent biological reality of the other species) but because the slime mold lacks any neurological capacity and therefore an inability for any thought let alone rational thought.3
Baboons are clearly neither untlannings nor framlings4. The question, then, becomes whether they are ramen5, varselse or odjurs. If they are odjurs then, barring those such as Peter Singer, no one would say that they should live if their death could save a person’s life. On the other hand, if they are ramen then not only is using their hearts to prolong human lives barbaric but killing them is murderous. Finally, if they are varselse then the waters become quite muddied and whether or not to use xenotransplant from baboons seems equiprobable.

1 Because, although pigs—for example—are quite intelligent animals, baboons share nintey-five percent of human DNA and are, at least arguably, rational.
2 Orson Scott Card. Xenocide. (New York: Tor Books, 1991).
3 To an extent this is not fair if conceptualizing in a multi-stellar and therefore a much wider evolutionary range than just Terra’s systems but we’re not so if a slime mold has no brain cells then we can be certain, knowing what we do about life on this planet, that because it doesn’t have brain cells then it can’t think.
4 I’m ignoring the however improbable possibility that they are indeed from another world but I believe no one will argue this point.
5 As, I would argue, some of the higher primates—such as Koko the silverback gorilla—are clearly ramen and can communicate with humans as much as their physiology allows.