Non-subordination is the framework’s deepest, and most deliberately chosen, commitment about the participant. It is not that everyone is useful, or will contribute, or even affects everyone else — it is that a being with an interior for whom something is at stake is not merely an instrument of the larger field, and cannot legitimately be treated entirely as one. The ecology may condition, depend on, constrain, and require things of a participant; it does not own them.
A participant is never exhausted by its usefulness to the field in which it participates.
This is what makes standing more than a prudential arrangement. The distributed-bearing argument gives the ecology a strong reason not to discard participants, but a reason of that kind could in principle be overturned by better prediction; non-subordination cannot, because it does not rest on the participant’s value to anything at all. It is the framework’s form of a commitment nearly every serious ethic reaches — that a being for whom things matter may not be reduced wholly to a means — stated openly as a starting point rather than deduced from ecology. See what the ecology may not own.