An open letter and campaign

Widen the Circle: An Open Letter to Ethical Humanists

To the Ethical Society of St. Louis, the American Ethical Union, the American Humanist Association, and every community that gathers around ethics instead of dogma.

Finish the sentence

In 1869, the historian W.E.H. Lecky mapped how moral progress actually happens: “At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world.”

Humanists know this passage. Peter Singer built The Expanding Circle around it. The moral circle has become one of the movement’s favorite metaphors, and for good reason: it describes exactly what ethical humanism has been doing for 150 years.

We are Project Animal Freedom, a St. Louis animal rights nonprofit working toward a fully vegan Midwest by 2056. This letter is an invitation: finish the sentence. Widen the circle.

Deed before creed

When Felix Adler stood up in New York in 1876 and proposed a moral community built on ethics alone, no dogma required, he launched a movement that took as its motto “deed before creed.” Ten years later, St. Louis answered. The Ethical Society of St. Louis has been asking how we should live, from its Platform, since 1886.

And the movement did not just ask. It acted. Ethical Culture built the Workingman’s School for the children of laborers. Adler chaired the National Child Labor Committee. Ethical Culture leader Henry Moskowitz helped found the NAACP. The American Humanist Association has spent more than eight decades defending reason, secular government, and human dignity.

Notice the pattern. Every one of those causes required widening the circle past where polite society had drawn it. Child laborers were invisible. Segregation was normal. Nonbelievers were suspect. In each case, ethical humanists looked at a boundary everyone else accepted and asked the only question that matters: can this line actually be defended?

The evidence has come in

Humanism follows evidence. So follow it here.

Darwin framed the core continuity argument in 1871: the difference in mind between humans and other animals is one of degree and not of kind. He did not settle it, and it would be dishonest to pretend a Victorian naturalist closed a question that modern neuroscience has spent fifty years opening. What has changed is the evidence. In 2012, prominent neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, affirming that mammals, birds, and other animals possess the neurological substrates of conscious experience. In 2024, the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness went further, stating strong scientific support for conscious experience in mammals and birds, and at least a realistic possibility of it across all vertebrates and many invertebrates, including cephalopods, crustaceans, and insects.

Pigs outperform dogs on some cognitive tests. Chickens count, anticipate, and deceive. Fish feel pain. These are findings, not sentiments.

We are writing the long version of that argument as a companion piece, The Book of Vegan: An Introduction to Ethical Animalism. This letter is the short version, and the ask that follows from it.

What the old boundary costs

Now hold that boundary up against reality.

Roughly 10 billion land animals are killed in the United States every year, more than 80 billion worldwide, and by a widely cited analysis of USDA data, about 99 percent of American farmed animals live on factory farms: crates, cages, sheds, slaughter lines. This is not farming as our grandparents pictured it. It is an industrial system built to convert sentient beings into product at maximum speed.

And the harm does not stop at the species line, which is precisely the point.

Factory farming fails workers: meatpacking remains one of the most dangerous jobs in America, its injuries documented by Human Rights Watch and the Government Accountability Office, its lines staffed disproportionately by immigrants and refugees with the least power to object. It fails public health: in 2024, drug companies reported selling or distributing roughly 15.6 million pounds of medically important antimicrobials for use in food-producing animals in this country, a 16 percent increase over the year before. The FDA is careful to say that sales are not the same as use. That caveat is the indictment: we can measure what enters the market, and we have no national system that measures how much is actually administered. Intensive animal production can also create the conditions that let zoonotic pathogens emerge, amplify, and spread. It fails the future: the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization attributes roughly 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions to livestock, while Humanist Manifesto III itself affirms a “planetary duty to protect nature’s integrity, diversity, and beauty.”

It also runs straight through the Midwest. The feed, the barns, the packing plants, and the political power that protects them are our neighbors’ industry and our states’ economy. This is not a coastal argument being mailed in. We live here.

You do not need to be vegan to see the problem. You only need to be consistent. What would we say about any other institution that professed compassion and reason while its catering contracts, its investments, and its silence propped up a system like this?

You would not be first

Communities of conscience have done harder things than this.

In 2011, after a four-year study process, delegates of the Unitarian Universalist Association adopted a Statement of Conscience on ethical eating, formally recognizing the moral weight of food choices for animals, workers, and the planet. It stopped short of a plant-based standard. Fifteen years of evidence later, ethical humanism can take the step our UU cousins approached.

Divestment is even more familiar ground. Congregations and ethical bodies pulled their money out of apartheid South Africa, out of tobacco, and out of fossil fuels. Screening a portfolio for slaughterhouses is the same moral logic applied to the same category of harm: refusing to profit from what you would never defend from your own Platform.

And the intellectual groundwork already sits on humanist shelves. The author of Animal Liberation has been honored across the organized humanist world, named Australian Humanist of the Year and a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. This argument is not foreign to humanism. It came from humanism.

What we are building, and where you fit

We should tell you plainly what we want, because a campaign that hides its goal is not being ethical with you.

Project Animal Freedom is working toward a fully vegan Midwest by 2056, and we define that in four parts: institutions that no longer serve animal products by default, a food system that no longer depends on animal agriculture, an economy in which vegan businesses are ordinary rather than remarkable, and a civic culture in which the case for animals is part of normal public life rather than a fringe position.

Notice which part comes first. Institutions. Not because institutions are the whole of it, but because institutions are where a private conviction becomes a public norm. One person going vegan changes one household. A community changing its own table changes what every person who walks through its doors assumes is normal.

Our work runs on five stages, and you can read the full version on our theory of change page. We reach people at markets, festivals, protests, and online. We give them a low-cost way to try. We build community, because social isolation and too little contact with other vegans are associated with people giving up, and community may be part of what helps them sustain the change. We give them real work to do. Then we hand what works to other cities and other organizations rather than keeping it. Reach, try, belong, act, multiply.

Humanist communities sit at the institutional layer and near the end of that ladder at the same time. You are institutions. You are also, structurally, exactly the kind of place where a person can try something, belong somewhere, and act on a conviction alongside people who share it. That combination is an asset our retention work suggests may matter, and it is the thing most advocacy groups have to build from nothing. You already have it. You built it for other reasons.

The Widen the Circle theory of change

Our parent theory of change moves people. This campaign moves communities. It runs in five steps, and each one maps onto a stage of the larger model.

Step three is the one institutional campaigns skip, and we think it is why institutional wins expire so quietly. A friendly staff member says yes, the practice lasts as long as that person does, and two years later nobody remembers the decision was made. Our retention evidence concerns individuals rather than institutions, so we are not going to claim it proves anything about your board. What we are doing is testing a related proposition: that a practice owned by members survives more reliably than a practice that depends on one sympathetic staff member. If that turns out to be wrong, Anchor is the wrong step, and we would rather find out than keep asserting it.

What has to be true for this to work

We would rather state our assumptions, and label how much evidence each one actually has, than dress them up as findings.

Rows three and four are the interesting ones, because they are answerable. Whether member-owned practices outlast staff-dependent ones is a real research question with a real method behind it, and it is exactly the sort of thing our research arm exists to test. We would rather put it in the field than keep asserting it in a letter.

The failure condition

If, after twenty-four months of sustained approach, no humanist community has adopted a single reversible commitment, we will treat the campaign’s approach-to-adoption strategy as having failed in its current form, say so publicly on this page, and change the argument, the method, or both.

Note what that result would and would not tell us. It would test the first two steps and only the first two. It would say nothing about Anchor, because Anchor would never have been reached. A campaign that cannot get to yes has not disproved its theory of what happens after the yes.

Sustained approach has to mean something specific, or the test quietly becomes unfalsifiable. So we will define it before the clock starts, say when the clock starts, and publish both here: communities approached, decision-makers contacted, meetings requested and meetings held, follow-ups sent, and Platform proposals submitted, each with a minimum number attached. A campaign that never quite reaches its own threshold has not been tested. It has been avoided.

Five commitments

So here is what we are asking of the Ethical Society of St. Louis, the American Ethical Union, the American Humanist Association, and every humanist community reading this. Five commitments, each of them achievable within a year, and for each one, what we will bring.

A ladder, not a leap

Nobody has to do all five on day one. There are three rungs, and every one of them is real.

• Signatory. Sign this letter, as an individual or as a community. It costs nothing and it tells us where the interest is.
• Partner. Adopt any one of the five commitments and let us help you deliver it.
• Charter Community. Adopt all five in writing. The first six Charter Communities will be invited to help set this campaign’s standards before we publish them, rather than endorse a finished PAF project. We would rather be told what we got wrong early.

The timetable

A campaign without dates is a mood. Here are ours. These phases sit inside Project Animal Freedom’s own four-year plan, which builds institutions in 2027, infrastructure in 2028, and spends 2029 and 2030 handing both to the rest of the movement.

The goals, and how to check them

Here is what success looks like, in numbers, on dates. Our anniversary is October 19, so that is when we count.

Two of those numbers are deliberately unimpressive. One community by the end of year one, and zero task forces, is what an honest early-stage campaign looks like. We would rather publish a one than promise a hundred.

Two rules we hold ourselves to

What we will not do

There is a version of this campaign that we are not running, and you should know that before you answer.

We will not protest your building. We will not run a petition against you, name and shame you in the press, or treat a slow board as a moral failure. If a community hears us out and declines, we will note publicly that we asked and were declined, we will not say anything unkind about you, and we will keep the door open. We have organized more than fifty events a year for eight years and we know exactly how to make an institution uncomfortable. We are choosing not to, because you are not an opponent. You are the closest thing this movement has to a natural ally, and we would like to act like it.

We will also go first, and keep going first. Project Animal Freedom has been plant-based by default since the day it was founded. We publish our reach numbers, our budget, and our mistakes. If we ask you to audit your portfolio, you can audit ours.

An invitation, not an indictment

We write as neighbors, and in many cases as fellow travelers.

On Monday, October 19, 2026, Project Animal Freedom turns eight, and we are celebrating with a Vegan Trivia Night in the Ethical Society’s own Becker Room: a potluck, an auction, and a room full of St. Louisans who found their way into this work through a shared meal rather than a lecture. In 2025 we reached an estimated 860,000 people across the St. Louis area with a simple message about compassion. In January, 768 people signed up for our St. Louis Veganuary Challenge. Almost none of them arrived through an argument. They arrived through a room, and a table, and someone who was glad to see them.

Which is to say: you already know how this works. It is what a Platform is. It is what a Sunday morning is. We are asking you to widen what happens in it.

Adler’s supreme rule was to act so as to elicit the best in others, and thereby in yourself. That is all we are asking the institutions of ethical humanism to do now, for beings who cannot ask for themselves.

Widen the circle. We will be right beside you when you do.

In solidarity,
The Project Animal Freedom Team

How to answer this letter

• Leaders, boards, and program committees: request a meeting. We will come to you, we will bring the model resolution, and we will not bring a camera.
• Members: sign the letter, then send it to your board and your committees. One member asking a question at the right meeting is worth more than anything we can mail you.
• Anyone: join the conversation at #WidenTheCircle, and if you want to see what our version of community looks like, our events are open to everyone, vegan or not.

Sign the letter Leaders and boards: request a meeting

Sources and notes

We are asking humanist communities to follow evidence, so here is ours.

• Moral circle: W.E.H. Lecky, History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869).
• Continuity of mind: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871).
• Consciousness: the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (2012) and the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness (2024).
• Cognition and pain: Marino and Colvin, Thinking Pigs, International Journal of Comparative Psychology (2015); Marino, Thinking Chickens, Animal Cognition (2017); and Brown, Fish Intelligence, Sentience and Ethics, Animal Cognition (2015), alongside the nociception literature those reviews draw on.
• Farmed animal numbers and the share raised on factory farms: USDA slaughter and census data, with the 99 percent figure drawn from Sentience Institute’s analysis of that data.
• Meatpacking conditions: Human Rights Watch and the US Government Accountability Office.
• Antimicrobials: FDA, Summary Report on Antimicrobials Sold or Distributed for Use in Food-Producing Animals, 2024 edition. The FDA states plainly that sales data do not represent actual use, and we have kept that caveat rather than dropping it, because it makes the point better than the number does.
• Livestock emissions: the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Note that the figure differs between FAO reports and editions, and we cite the current one.
• Zoonotic risk: the peer-reviewed literature on intensive production and pathogen emergence, which supports the mechanism while being careful about whole-system comparisons.
• Humanist and UU sources: Humanist Manifesto III (American Humanist Association, 2003) and the Unitarian Universalist Association Statement of Conscience on Ethical Eating (2011).
• Retention: Faunalytics research on current and former vegetarians and vegans, which finds that social factors are associated with lapsing and recommends more community support. It is association, not proof of cause, and we describe it that way everywhere on this site.

If you find an error here, tell us and we will correct it on this page with a dated note. That is the standard we are asking of you, so it is the standard we hold on our own copy.

Widen the Circle is a campaign of Project Animal Freedom, an IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 83-3007847.
By the Project Animal Freedom Team. Last updated September 2026.
Spot something wrong on this page? Email info@projectanimalfreedom.org and we will correct it.