There's a great Billy Joel Song about honesty. Honesty has a lot of meanings. You can respond with honesty, give honesty when it's not asked for, give partially honest information, etc..And then there are all the brands of that don't involve speaking at all, which fall more along the lines of integrity and its evil twin, hypocrisy. It's pretty easy to guess the origins of most of the old religious laws* Killing someone probably meant someone was going to kill you, then someone would kill them, and so on until your little tribe of twenty nomads was whittled down to a 3 month-old getting mauled by an unchecked dog. Adultery rules probably stemmed jealousy, inheritance disputes, and disease, preventing a similar fate for our canine-curious toddler. But what about honesty? That's a toughy.
Lying is certainly not a uniquely human trait, although there are animal behaviors, such as hoarding hidden food in a time of starvation, that we would consider dishonest for humans but not for our furry brethren. I think it's a social setting that really gives lying its teeth. If interdependence between humans was minimal, it really wouldn't matter what you said because it wouldn't affect anyone. But we naturally form groups with varying degrees of interdependence, and in order for those groups to be cohesive, it's often necessary to share information that is detrimental to someone's immediate self-interest**. When we have information we know would benefit the group but would harm ourselves if revealed, we feel internal pressure to come clean (i.e. guilt) . That's for the big stuff. I think honesty regarding petty issues is looked at as a sign of trustworthiness to handle more important situations.


I'm tired. I leave you with the following battle. Who would win?





VS.









*I'm assuming here that the more universal rules were/are essential for the long-term survival of a society, not that we follow some infallible, divine moral code
**This is called social contract theory. John Locke wrote about it.