Here's some analysis of Shippey's essay:
http://www.hatrack.com/svu/tolkien_lewis/al's%20Tolkienpaper.html
and the particularly relevant piece:
Shippey also makes an interesting point when he analyzes the discussion between Shagrat and Gorbag when they find Frodo at Cirith Ungol he says, “What the episode with Shagrat and Gorbag reveals is that orcs are moral beings, with an underlying morality much the same as ours.” However, if that is true, it seems that an underlying morality has no effect at all on actual behavior. How, then is an essentially correct theory of good and evil corrupted? If one starts from a sound moral basis, how can things go so disastrously wrong? It should require no demonstration to show that this is one of the vital questions raised with particular force during the twentieth century, in which the most civilized people have often committed the worst atrocities. Tolkien deserves credit for noting the problem, and refusing to turn his back on it, as so many of his canonical literary contemporaries did. Shippey also mentions that Tolkien “Insists in several places that evil has no great power. It ‘mocks’ and does not make.’”
AND:
FROM:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.f...4f77b?lnk=raot
They are cruel, they are greedy and they are selfish.
They also take delight in the degradation and humiliation of others,
and they derive pleasure from hurting and torturing others.
> But we also see that they are capable of an inner social structure,
But so are ants and other animals, so that fact alone doesn't really
make much of a difference, I'd say. The important thing must be the
nature of that social structure, and in the matter of the Orcs, their
social structure seems to be strictly a hierarchical pecking order
with the strongest in the top, cruelly dominating the rest.
> and as Tolkien insists that they breed like all other beings on
> Middle Earth, there must also be mothers, youngsters, etc.