I agree with most of what you've written here. Of course it's exciting and astonishing if there's an afterlife, and yes it will destroy many paradigms.
What I was getting at was that NDEs don't seem to give us any DETAILED guidance about how to live in this world or about how to make this world a better place. With ethics, the devil is in the details, and we need to know exactly how to organize the economy, respect the environment, get the right balance between community and individual freedom, eat in an ethical way, and on and on. Just saying 'Love each other' doesn't really help with any of this. Ethics is really hard, which is why moral philosophers spend their lives arguing about it.
Well - loving one another would be a great start. Apparently we can't even do that. But I see what you are saying. And I agree with you that ethics is not simple, in fact can be quite hard, and yes, philosophers have spent their lives writing about it.
However, it can't be ignored that a good deal of social darwinism is based on ethics that the only purpose in life is a kind of struggle for survival. In addition, that the only human knowledge available is dependent on the apparent objective world, and nothing transcendent or beyond this reality can or should have an impact on our daily living or ethical choices.
Now ethics, in part, is based on what we believe reality is and what we believe is our ultimate human destination and purpose in reality (and I should also add origin. Sad that origin is taken so seriously by science these days, but destination as an inquiry is still marginalized by the orthodoxy). I guess you could argue that one can make up your ethics without having a belief or position about reality and purpose, but to me and to many (and many philosophers) that would be an arbitrary kind of ethics, an existential basis for ethics, which would be like believing in ferry dust, since it would be grounded in nothing but your own arbitrary creative act. Ethics would not be a real thing in truth. The same would be true if we are indeed just biological deterministic robots as the materialists posit - then obviously, what appears as choice in our lives, is not in truth choice, and you simply cannot have ethics if everything including consciousness - is just automated and determined. Trying to argue there can be ethics in a mechanical universe, and mechanical consciousness is rationally absurd.
But getting back to the research in NDEs. Here we have some initial scientific data that may point to something far more than just this single reality that has been our scientific model of being now for some time. Well, it isn't just NDE research. We also have a lot of physicists now hypothesizing multi-dimensions with string-theory, and of course you have in quantum physics the still unresolved observer measurement problem, which has sprung a variety of remarkable scientific hypothesis, not the least of which is the multi-universes interpretation, which happens to be pretty popular at the moment. But all physicists do not dispute the evidentiary data that has been established in quantum physics, just the interpretation of that data. (I personally am with John Von Neumann's interpretation of the measurement problem).
So pretty much it is really beginning to look like there really does exist something outside of our reality - what traditionally in theology has been called the transcendent. This transcendent aspect also has been empirically observed with much of the work of the depth psychologists, including Freud and Jung, and earlier Frederic Myers. So interestingly, you are having a convergence in the science of psychology, and the science of physics both indicating that there is more to reality than just random billiard balls of atoms and particles. In fact, we now know that virtual particles are all the time coming in and out of existence within the vacuum of space. Where they come from and where they go to - well I guess that's what Schrodinger and the early quantum physicists called the universal wave function or quantum non-local field of reality. Whatever! It hardly gives us any clue to what the actual scientific topography of that "transcendent" reality that exists, but the important thing here is that it does exist! I mean, that in itself is pretty astonishing and still being resisted by the hardcore materialists.
So if a transcendent reality does exist how does it have a bearing on our ethics? Well for starters, the teleological foundation of social darwinism and this idea that we randomly have come into being and our only purpose is to mechanically replicate ourselves - appears to be shaken. In addition, it means that there is a possibility that all human knowledge may not be constrained to this one reality we find ourselves in. Indeed, the work of Carl Jung, and other psychologists with the unconscious, appear to demonstrate what they have labeled as the "transcendent function" in individuation, whereas, knowledge comes to the psyche that does not depend on a strictly materialistic model or single reality model. In fact, Jung went even further in his later years and posited the unconscious itself was an autonomous objective reality the archetypes of which not only exist in human consciousness, but also form a mold and drive the very nature we experience. Pretty profound - and this is the hypothesis he reached after an entire lifetime of studying human consciousness, especially the unconscious and human creativity (which has its source in the unconscious). Of course, much work in parapsychology, and abnormal psychology, have established that the psyche apparently can and does possess non-local attributes and can appear to have knowledge not normally accessible given the strict mind-body model of the materialists.
How again does this all fit into a model of ethics? Well IMO, it dramatically shifts the ground underneath the nihilistic view of reality posited by the philosophy of materialism. It doesn't necessarily establish that there is a "God" so to speak. But it does establish that the narrow constrictions of a belief system based on a single reality and a consciousness that is a random product of that reality is unfounded. And since we base our choices and ethics on what we think we are and reality is, it will impact our ethics considerably. In addition, perhaps most important of all, if each of us, each of our consciousness has a true teleology in life (not an existential arbitrarily made up one), that is not dependent on a single reality (since there are other realities) and that that purpose and destiny may not depend entirely on what we consciously know at the "ego" level, but what resides within a deeper more profound unconscious reality that permeates our psyche and in fact all reality (whatever it is, not necessarily God) then how we choose to live our lives and treat others can be based on a much deeper grounding of what we in truth really are.
My Best,
Bertha