Rethinking Innovation Beyond Utility: When a Patent Decides What Counts as New

Rethinking innovation beyond utility starts with an uncomfortable observation: we mostly judge new things by whether they sell, scale or save time. A new paper by Himani Kaushik, published in Ethics and Society, argues that this habit isn’t neutral. Writing about innovation as a concept, Kaushik contends that the dominant model measures technological development through patentability, profitability and efficiency, and treats innovation as a technical or financial matter rather than an ethical one (Scienmag summary of the paper).

The stakes aren’t abstract. If a system only recognises certain kinds of novelty, other kinds quietly stop counting — and stop being funded, protected or taught.

Philosophy of technology and innovation ethics: five lenses

Kaushik builds the case from five thinkers. Heidegger warned against seeing the world as a calculable “standing reserve” of resources waiting for use. Ellul described technological systems developing their own momentum, so their spread starts to feel inevitable rather than chosen. Feenberg argued the opposite possibility: technology is socially shaped, so it can be redirected through democratic, participatory processes. Ihde showed that technologies mediate how we meet the world at all — a tool is never just a tool. Stiegler pointed to the psychological costs of algorithmic capitalism and argued for an economy built on contribution and care (Scienmag).

Different diagnoses, one shared refusal: none of them accepts that a technology’s value is settled by its usefulness alone.

How patent law defines innovation, case by case

The paper’s sharpest move is legal. Patent systems ask whether an invention is new, useful and industrially applicable, then grant exclusive rights in exchange for disclosure. Kaushik argues that this test does quiet philosophical work: it decides what counts as innovation in the first place, and it can push aside traditional knowledge, open-source software and local environmental solutions that don’t fit the form (Scienmag).

Consider Diamond v. Chakrabarty. In 1980 the US Supreme Court held, 5–4, that a live, human-made micro-organism — a genetically engineered bacterium able to break down crude oil — was patentable as a “manufacture” or “composition of matter,” a product of human ingenuity with a distinctive name, character and use. The Court added that arguments about the hazards of genetic research belonged to Congress and the Executive, not the judiciary (full text of the decision).

Kaushik reads that ruling, alongside Myriad Genetics and Mayo v. Prometheus, as patent law performing a world-making role: drawing the line between nature and invention, owner and outsider, while framing its choices in procedural rather than ethical terms (Scienmag).

Heidegger, standing reserve and innovation on a global scale

The argument then goes global. The WTO’s TRIPS Agreement, signed in 1994 and in force from 1995, sets minimum intellectual-property standards for all member states. A standard legal analysis of TRIPS notes both its aims — harmonised protection, technology transfer — and the standing criticisms: that it reflects developed-country interests, raises medicine prices, and does not adequately protect traditional knowledge, folklore or biodiversity-related innovation (Advocate Gandhi, TRIPS analysis).

Kaushik’s paper gives that criticism a philosophical name, citing scholars who call the erasure of non-Western knowledge under standardisation a form of “legal epistemicide.” Knowledge held collectively, passed on orally, or preserved by a community struggles to appear inside a system built around a named individual inventor and a written specification (Scienmag).

The paper applies the same lens to current fields: in artificial intelligence, questions of bias and accountability trail behind the race to automate; gene editing blurs nature and culture; platform companies optimise for convenience and profit while labour insecurity and algorithmic monitoring grow alongside (Scienmag).

Rethinking innovation beyond utility: what governing differently would look like

The proposals are institutional, not mystical: interdisciplinary ethics panels that include community representatives, mandatory impact assessments for transformative technologies, citizens’ assemblies and other co-creation mechanisms, protection of the public domain, recognition of communities’ rights in their own knowledge, and philosophy of technology taught inside STEM degrees as “technical humanities” (Scienmag).

Analysis: you don’t have to accept every step — the Chakrabarty court would reply that legislatures, not judges or philosophers, should draw these lines, and it said so at the time. But the paper’s core point is hard to dodge. Every patent granted or refused, every funding call written around commercial readiness, is already a judgement about what kind of newness deserves to exist. Calling that judgement “utility” doesn’t make it less of a choice.

Photo: Esculab, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Sources

1. https://scienmag.com/philosophers-argue-innovation-is-not-just-utility-but-a-moral-and-ontological-act/
2. https://chanrobles.com/usa/us_supremecourt/447/303/index.php
3. https://advocategandhi.com/trips-agreement-a-comprehensive-legal-analysis-of-intellectual-property-in-global-trade/