Standing is not approval guards the concept against its most common misreading — that granting everyone standing means calling everyone wonderful, excusing every behavior, or tolerating violence and disorder. It requires none of those. Jurisdiction can still be withdrawn, consequences still apply, and other participants are still protected; what does not happen is the participant dropping out of consideration altogether. The rule is narrow and firm:
No failure of behavior, productivity, status, health, wealth, or conformity automatically removes the participant from the field of legitimate concern.
Put that way it is both more defensible and more demanding than an appeal to dignity — defensible because it asserts nothing about anyone’s virtue, and demanding because it holds precisely for the participant one would most like to write off. It is the companion to standing precedes usefulness: one fixes that standing is not earned, the other that it is not withdrawn by disapproval.