Quote:
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If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost. This was the teaching of the Wise, though in the horror of the War it was not always heeded. Morgoth's Ring, HoMe X, 419
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I believe the question of whether orcs were irredeemably evil or not gave Tolkien a lot of headache. If orcs indeed were corrupted forms of elves and/or men they then would have had a 'fea' granted by Eru and a rational mind capable of moral choices, as others already have pointed out.
But consider the above quote in the light of what happened during the first battles of Beleriand. During the second battle, the elves were said to have routed the orc hosts so severly that "no more than a handful of leaves" returned to Angband. During the third battle the orc host was destroyed "to the last and least".
If orcs were rational beings and not mindless beasts, this would've be a terrible crime. Surely at some point before their ultimate annihilation the orcs must have realised they were uttterly defeated and asked for mercy or at least tried to flee. Yet they were slaughtered to the last man.
I'm sure Tolkien had this in mind when he later on tried to device other orgins of orcs to replace 'the corrupted elves'-one. Yet he realised that it wasn't belivable to say they were just mindless beasts. They were not. IMO Tolkien really tried to make up a plausable theory on how they could've been beasts, but never quite managed it. He really wanted them to be beasts but realised that they couldn't be, not without contradicting much of what he already had written. There's just no way that Melkor could have made intelligent and rational humaniods out of beasts, without granting him the gift of original creation, and this was out of the question.