You are a cheater. I am a cheater, too. The professor who caught you cheating—he cheats too, at least according to Dr. Dan Areily, a Professor of Behavior Economics at Duke University. According to Dr. Areily, the vast majority of us (except for some outliers) are prone to cheating under the right circumstances.

Last Friday, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency stripped celebrated cyclist Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour De France titles, for cheating. As a matter of fact, nine of the last 14 winners of the race have been bereaved of the accomplishment. It appears the sport is rife with equivocation, at its most cardinal and competitive level.

US News & World Report has Wash. U. ranked in the top 15 of undergraduate programs in the country. Newsweek has us ranked #1 as the “most stressful college.” Considering the aforementioned facts, one would be prudent to argue that the environment here is ripe for the potential of widespread academic dishonesty—and it is. I’ve seen it, and chances are you have too. Some studies indicate that 75% of college undergraduates have cheated.

Dr. Areily’s research suggests that the motivation to cheat may be buried within the problem itself. Even though most of us are cheaters, we only cheat so much as we can still respect ourselves. Would you plagiarize your entire dissertation? No, you’d feel like a failure. Aside from the occasional sociopath, most of us are only willing to lie only if we can justify it to ourselves. We are willing to share answers on our calc homework, but probably unwilling to break into our professor’s office and steal the answer key for an exam. It seems we demonstrate a moral compass that allows us to deviate only slightly from total honesty.

We have engineered a society where the unspoken mantra is “cheating is ok as long as we don’t really hurt anyone else and we can live with ourselves afterward.” Ethically, this is balderdash, but, as a culture, we have fully accepted it and subsequently swept it under the rug. Cheating is the bastard child of modern, western, capitalist and utilitarian society. We all know it’s wrong but our desire to reach the top of the rat race supersedes a desire to be exclusively honest. If it can be justified that cheating will bear fruit for ourselves, our families and the world, it will continue. How many millions has Lance Armstrong raised to fight cancer? Could he have accomplished such a feat by losing the Tour de France seven times? No.

Assuming these statistics are correct, what do we do about it? Should we increase the consequences? Hold seminars on academic dishonesty? Institute full cavity searches prior to exams? I suspect that an increase in ‘academic security’ would yield about as much success as the TSA’s policy of shoe removal does at identifying terrorists. It would only serve to put a Band-Aid on what is a much greater socio-cultural quandary that transcends academia and sports and spills over into every facet of our lives: relationships, politics, the banking industry.

Could it be possible that the answer is to do nothing? Individualism is sacred to our understanding of our modern American selves. Initiating a bum-steer-witch-hunt in order to stamp out the little white lie would result in a direct violation of that understanding. The notion of career politicians accusing baseball players of cheating already turns my stomach. In contrast, letting loose the reins would allow liars to run free. We would turn “The Prince” into a Bible. The current measured response to cheating is the appropriate course of action. Look the other way when we copy homework answers, but come out with guns blazing when Lance Armstrong cheats to win the greatest bike race in history…seven times.

For better or worse, we live in a world of credit default swaps, insider trading, erythropoietin, false advertising, card counting and academic dishonesty. Until we are willing to trade in utilitarian ethics and capitalism for deontology and moral collectivism, we will continue to find ourselves in this awkward predicament of tacitly justifying the unjustifiable. If the current direction of western society is any indicator, I suspect this won’t happen anytime soon.