[dancing spawn of ungoliant]

Originally Posted by Sauce

But the difficulty, as far as I am concerned, is not so much in trying to understand Orcish "morality", but rather why they are condemned to a life of evil (portrayed as wrong by Tolkien in his writings) through no fault or choice of their own and indiscriminately slain without remorse by those on the side of good.

This is actually a movie line, but I think it's appropriate to quote it here: "Show them no mercy, for you shall receive none!" If it's not in an orc's nature to feel empathy, showing remorse for a creature like that is a lost cause (speculating on the basis of my previous post).

When you think of other stories, especially children's books, it's rather black-and-white, who is evil and who is good. We don't ponder if it had been possible to cure the witch in the gingerbread house from her cannibalistic tendencies, but we are just happy that Hansel and Gretel got to push her into an oven, which actually makes the children murderers, now that I think of it.

It is not possible to divide people to purely evil and purely good individuals in real life. When in a story we are told that someone is plain evil, that might confuse us because the concept of being narurally evil is strange to us, but we can either accept it or start looking for reasons and loopholes.

I quite agree with what davem said...

That said, if Orcs are viewed as equivalent to Christian Demons, as I suggested previously, there is less of an issue. Orcs & Elves, in their origins are effectively a 'mythologisation' of the Angels & Demons (ie Fallen Angels, who were corrupted by Satan) placed in a mythic history of Humankind. I suspect that if Tolkien had called the creatures Demons rather than Goblins no-one would have even asked whether it was 'fair' that they should be condemned to a life of evil.

... but there's still the problem that we tend to think that Fallen Angels were good Angels before they were corrupted and they became evil. Orcs, however, were born evil by nature, so they didn't get to choose between right and wrong, and to contemporary people like us it might actually be the freedom to choose that makes all the difference.

Originally Posted by davem

Well, this illustrates the problem in attempting to Christianise non-Christian things. Whatever Tolkien believed, you simply cannot have 'Christian' Elves or Faeries or Goblins, because those beings, & the world they inhabit, are non-Christian. Faerie does not live by the Ten Commandments.

Certainly there is a 'natural' moral code, a set of 'Laws' within Faerie, but these are bound up with its nature - if you break one of the 'rules' of Faerie you won't just get arrested & taken to court, where some clever Lawyer will get you six months in the Bahamas with a Social Worker of your choice in order to 'rehabilitate' you back into society - more likely you'll be eaten by a Dragon, or forced to perform six impossible tasks before breakfast.

I think the 'moral code' in Tolkien's world isn't that different from ours, but it's rather the setting that makes it look dissimilar. Although the constitutional law in many countries is based on the Ten Commandments given in the Old Testament, in a Christian society, wouldn't it be more appropriate to go with the New Testament; that remorse and asking for forgiveness is enough to atone for our crimes? Well, that isn't the custom. We want to see justice, we want to see that evil gets what it deserves and the good guys win, depending on what we consider to be right and wrong. That is the system in any society, and even in Tolkien's Middle-Earth.