LotR -- Book 3 - Chapter 03 - The Uruk-Hai

[Aiwendil]

HerenIstarion wrote:

That's why, in a sense, difficulties are solved by supposition that Orkish leaders (as opposed to whole mass of 'beast-orcs') are, at least, not depraved of free will, but it does raise another difficulty – it is unmerciful to slaughter them, as they (assuming they have free will) are equals by rank of 'Good Chaps'

But there is no real evidence of this (at least I don't think so) in LotR. We do not see some Orcs behaving as though they have free will and others as though they are 'mere beasts'. And later on we do have at least one Orc that is clearly not a leader and yet has a speaking part not much different from Ugluk or Grishnakh - that is the Snaga in Mordor.

The Saucepan Man wrote:

But it still, for me, leaves the problem that we never encounter an Orcish leader who, exercising his free will, has chosen to be good.

We also see very few Elves that, exercising their free will, choose to be evil. Maeglin does go rather bad. Eol and the sons of Feanor both do some evil things, though I wouldn't classify them as simply evil. And presumably there is a lot more external pressure on the Orcs to remain evil than there was on those Elves to remain good.

I think that the fictional "truth" of the matter must simply be that Orcs do have free will but due to the strength of the external influences upon them none (or at least none that we hear of) choose to be good. It is an unfortunate fact that this kind of thing does happen - there have been situations where large populations of people have committed or allowed clearly immoral acts (like the Holocaust). The case of the Orcs is certainly an exaggeration of this, but after all this is a fantasy world.

I do admit, though, that that answer is not entirely satisfactory, and I think that the nature of Orcs is one of the few real foundational problems in the legendarium.

Davem wrote:

We also have comments in this chapter about orcs being 'good lads', which almost seems to imply that if they don't care about their own kind (in the sense of feeling compassion for them), they do value them in some way.

These don't seem to be the same Orcs we encounter in the Silmarillion.

What makes you say this? We have few glimpses in the Silmarillion material of Orcs in anything like the kind of detail afforded by this chapter; but I have always felt that the glimpses we do have do match up rather well with the depiction in LotR. For example, consider the Orc-captain in the "Lay of Leithien" who boasts about killing Barahir and decides to keep the Ring of Felagund for himself, since Sauron, in his view, has enough trinkets already. This is exactly the sort of thing one can imagine a LotR Orc doing; even the manner of the Orc's speech (aside from the octosyllabic couplets) is very similar to that of the Orcs here.