Vaughana Feary

This paper shows that in order to understand and to resolve the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace, the corporate world will have to relinquish some myths. Sexual harassment does not result from ignorance about fact or law. It is not merely a cultural, gender, or communication problem. It is a problem which will be resolved only when the corporate world recognizes that sexual harassment is a moral problem and provides moral education for employees. Until then, it will remain an explosive problem for communication specialists.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have established second tier protection for commercial speech under the First Amendment by according it some, but not all, of the protections accorded ideological speech. The Court''s arguments closely parallel John Staurt Mill''s utilitarian arguments about liberty, liberty-limiting principles and trade in his classic essay,On Liberty, and hence are subject to the same defects as any utilitarian analysis and justification of a right. Recent philosophical apologies for the Court''s bifurcated approach to free speech are unpersuasive. Commercial speech protects fundamental interests. There are important connections between freedom of commercial speech and political and personal autonomy. It is possible to extend full protection to commercial speech, while simultaneously minimizing its potential for abuse. Such considerations provide compelling arguments for taking the right to freedom of commercial communication seriously by according it full First Amendment protection and by restricting it only when competing and over-riding rights claims, or weightier considerations of justice, can be adduced.