An Analysis Of Dishonesty For Suckers?

Is honesty for suckers?
The cheating Scandal at Volkswagen sparked many debates and wide spread complaints on the acts itself, and how these acts are/were handled by the justice system. Among most of these complaints, one topic that was common was that most of frauds/cheatings having major effects are getting more and more frequent and are somehow getting by with almost no major moral consequences. There were also some rather interesting take on honesty that were presentenced on some of the article.
On one of the article was the discussions about the act of dishonesty itself, and how the losses due to the cheating of the emission test stood up to losses incurred by other related problems. The writer also included the financial burden the cheating

There is no such thing as being “more honest” or being “less honest”. There exists only two categories: honesty and dishonesty, and there are no other categories of honesty based on the effects it has. Furthermore, the effect itself cannot judged by someone outside the pool of the affected people. For example, of two corrupt employees of different companies facing trial for corruption, both had stolen money form the customers of the company. While one had overcharged $2000 to one very rich client, the other overcharged $10 to a 100 middle class clients. What is the measure of dishonesty here? Who is “more dishonest?” While one’s dishonesty had the greater figure, other’s on the other hand affected more people. How can we judge the severity of the effects? Furthermore, how can we judge the impact of losing money on the victims? It could be the rest of their savings or their throw away money. We cannot judge the importance of the money by comparing it with something completely irrelevant like, the price of .7 grams of gold or the cost of the advertisement of a small company. No one can be certain of the range of impact the effects of dishonesty has, except the victim. So, it is almost absurd to quantify honesty taking its effects into