It seems to me good thoughts are simple, and relaxed. They are things like “I should go help Bill take in that crop, since his wife is sick”.
Evil thoughts are always filled with tension–latent or overt–and fear. Doing evil–inflicting pain–is the only real release from them, and is always temporary and short in extent.
In the first case, your actions start from a place of peace, and grow from there. In the second, your actions start from a place of fear, which you are trying to escape. But you never can, since the means used make you even more afraid and alone.
Goodness is what remains when everything else is taken from you. To return to an example from a few posts ago, if you wake up somewhere, with no memory, not knowing where you are, what will remain is what is important in you. And as I have argued, the Rejection of Self Pity, Perseverence, and the sincere desire to understand are the three values which always lead, over time, to Goodness.
Existential philosphers start from the same point I do: radical freedom. Verworfenheit. Either the absence or unknowability of God.
Where they err, though, is in not positing what the most basic, helpful decisions are that you can make. If you are free, then logically why not act in such a way as to maximize the BENEFITS of that freedom? Why dilate on the freedom itself, while rejecting all common sense solutions to the anxiety that freedom engenders? Why focus on problems and not solutions?
The obvious answer is that most “professional” thinkers were never engaged in trying to DO anything. Sartre made his peace quickly and effortlessly with the Nazis (after being interned for a time not for doing anything daring, but for getting drafted), then forever after criticized others for not doing more. He was a little shit in every possible way.
Most Existentialists wound up as political radicals, typically (and hypocritically) as Communists. Communism gave them a cult to belong to that did not require God. They were able to subordinate their freedom, while claiming to be authentic. This is A solution, just not a good solution. Quite the contrary. I have in mind in particular Sartre and de Beauvoir (who subordinated herself to Sartre as well), who did so much to advance the cause of Communist Imperialism.
I am a fan of Albert Camus for the simple reason that he outgrew this, since in my view he genuinely wanted to be a good person. Over time, my strong feeling is that his politics would have moved in a genuinely liberal direction, had he had not died prematurely.