The near-death experiences (NDEs) of people bring to light several facts about life that people need to appreciate and accept. To begin with, NDEs enable people to see that materialism is not as fulfilling as it seems to be. The people who undergo NDEs come to a point in life when the material things that they have gathered no longer matters to them. Such materials are insignificant when one is going through an NDE. Secondly, love is an important aspect of life whose importance greatly reveals itself at the point when one is going through an NDE. At that point, most people only remember and appreciate the times they have shared love or reciprocated such love in others. Lastly, the importance of being helpful to other people when they need help is another aspect that is espoused by NDEs (Anderson & Barone, 2000). Most people who undergo NDEs often regret they times they failed to help others and appreciate the times they were helped or they helped other people.
A consideration of the NDEs presents a challenge to both relativists as well as objectivists traditional moral theories. First, the utilitarianism theory judges the morality of an action or a choice based on the outcomes or consequences. Therefore, if a choice or an action results into maximum good for the majority of people, it is considered morally right (Barrow, 2016). However, such good whose outcome is used to evaluate the morality of an action or decision may yield positive material good for the people and undermine other forms of good such as demonstration of compassion that cannot be quantified materially. NDEs point to the importance of other non-material factors such as love and compassion that may not be demonstrated through the evaluation of good from a utilitarian perspective.
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Secondly, NDEs demonstrate culturally universal standards of evaluating morality such demonstration of life, helping other people, and little emphasis on material acquisition. Such factors are universal across cultures contrary to the perception that morality is culturally relative as depicted from the cultural relativism theory (Benedict, 1934).
References
Benedict, R. (1934). Anthropology and the Abnormal. The Journal of General Psychology, 10 (1), 59-82.
Anderson, G., & Barone, A. (2000). Lessons from the light: Extraordinary messages of comfort and hope from the other side . New York: Berkley Books.
Barrow, R. (2016). Utilitarianism: A contemporary statement . Taylor & Francis.
