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Originally Posted by SPM
But if a person is bad, there might be things that society can at least try do to change the factors which have contributed to that, for example by addressing the ignorance, poverty and/or despair which leads people sometimes to commit crimes.
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We're dealing with two different issues here, imo. First is why people
want to commit crimes (steal, kill, cheat, etc), & second is why they actually go ahead & actually commit the offence.
There may be any number of reasons why someone wants to commit an offence, social, moral, even philosophical. You could spend years getting to the bottom of it. The reason they actually go ahead & act on that desire is much simpler - either they think they won't get caught, or they believe that even if they do get caught the consequences will be trivial.
Or to give an example - if you put £20,000 in used notes outside your house tonight with a sign saying 'Private Property, please do not touch' you wouldn't expect to find it there in the morning, because there are lots of people out there who want free money & their reasons will be many & varied, good & bad.
On the other hand, if you put the 20 grand there & surrounded it with armed guards ready to shoot anyone who came within a hundred feet of it, you'd more than likely find the whole lot there when you woke up (unless the guards had run off with it, of course).
Now the reason it would still be there in the second scenario is not that the presence of armed guards had changed the needs or desires of the potential thieves, but simply because you had made the consequences of stealing it sufficiently unpleasant & dangerous.
Now, in the case of Orcs, they are in the same position, it seems to me. By nature they have a tendency to evil, which, far from being deterred by their leaders, is instead actively encouraged.
I'm sure that Tolkien had something akin to Original Sin in mind with all his creatures. All that is needed for Evil to flourish is for Good Men to do nothing. Within Orcs, clearly, any Good is rendered worthless in the society in which they grow.
Yet they do seem to have a value system of their own (see Shagrat & Gorbag's discussion in TT). Perhaps there's an Orcish 'heaven' for those Orcs who live according to Orcish rules, those who truly & fully live out their 'Orcishness'. Who knows. In M-e, however, they are irremediably evil & revel in that fact.