What is the reason for morality? For ethical values?
This is a very important question that has faced poor Homo Sapiens since eons.

Now, granted our primeval hunter-gatherer was not civilized enough to be sipping tea while reading Shakespeare with a monocle; but he still faced the need to come up with some reason for his discomfort in doing various unethical things like say killing his tribe.

And thus sprang the theist explanation of the ethical way being God’s way.
That a respect for God’s way, and a fear of punishment [eternal damnation/painful bad-karmic rebirths] is the reason people are ethical.

Now this is a prominent attack against atheists – that renouncing God implies renouncing ethics. Atheists have brushed aside this argument with gay abandon.
Drawing inspiration from even theists like Einstein –
“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”

They consider the very question of why one should be ethical as preposterious. It is logical for a civlized society to be ethical, they patiently say (while adjusting their monocle and sipping their tea)

The above reason belies the real reason behind ethics. Ethics very obviously does not logically follow from economic efficiency.

The primary reason why we are ethical is biological. For example, there is a part of the brain, which when damaged impairs moral judgement but does not impair IQ. Again, to blame (or to praise) is the long hunter-gatherer period in which most of humanity’s evolutionary period has been spent.

The last sentence has a deep import – Most of our ethics are a result of economic efficiencies in an eons-ago period of time!!!

You put down your monocle, you stop sipping your tea. How can we modify our ethics according to the times if we are biologically wired, you astutely ask. The human biology is fascinating – a large part of the ethical way is hardwired to be flexible, at the risk of sounding oxymoronic. Consider even killing fellow-humans: a person born in a cannibalistic society typically does not have deep ethical qualms about eating other humans.

Thus, if a society has a consensus that ethics should follow economic efficiency and change with the times, it is possible to behave under the new ethics.
If genetic engineering becomes more powerful, we could even change our “ethical hardwirings”.
But there is one basic impediment to that.
Yes, our ethics.