[tumhalad2]

I have found the essay and I can here present some of the relevant informations:
[I]
Orcs, Wraiths, Wrights: Tolkien's Images of Evil[/I

"...Shagrat sees nothing wrong with Gorbat's use of "elvish" and Gorbat has no quarrel with Shagrat's sense of humour.

The subtle irony makes a point that is repeated again and again in the orcish conversation we hear, and which in its wider implications is important for Tolkien to stress again and again...Briefly what the episode of Shagrat and Gorbag reveals is that orcs are moral beings, with an underlying reality much the same as ours. But if that is true, it seems that an underlying morality has no effect of actual behaviour. If one starts from a sound moral basis, how can things go disastrously wrong? It should require no demonstration that this is one of the vital questions raised with particular force during the twentieth century, in which the worst atrocities have often been committed by the most civilized people...Orcs in fact place a high theoretical value on mutual trust and loyalty. "Rebel" is another one of their pejorative words...Snaga says to Shagrat "I've fought for the Tower against those stinking Morgul-rats", which shows a kind of limited loyalty. Another favourite word among the orcs is "lads", a word that implies male bondage and good fellowship...It should be pointed out that Gorbag and Shagrat soon fall out, and their ideal of being "trusty" is ironic because Shagrat says "I don't trust all my lads, and none of yours, nor you neither, when you're mad for fun"...nevertheless Mauhar and his lads do turn up and make an attempted rescue. The orcs furthermore, -to say the best one can of them-understand the concept of parley...Saruman's orcs show great pride in their boast, many times repeated "We are the fighting Uruk-hai".

Although all orcs appear to be man eaters, they do not appear to be cannibalistic, but reserve that catagorisation for orcs who eat other orcs...

It would be tedious to point out all the ways in which these claims are systematically disproved or ironized...But the point remains, the orcs recognize the idea of goodness, appreciate humour, value loyalty, trust, group cohesion, and the ideal of a higher cause than themselves, and condemn failings from these ideas in others. So, if they know what is right, how does it happen that they persist in wrong? The question becomes more persistant in that the orcish behaviour is also perfectly clearly human behaviour...

After all, if all evil creatures in the beginning were good...what justice is there in condemning them irrivocably to perdition? Could there not be some way of saving them? Tolkien never took up the challenge of finding some way of educating or "rehabilitating" the orcs, though he was aware of it [Shippey points to Morgoth's Ring] and though he did spend considerable time on the possibility of rehabilitating Gollum...Orcish behaviour, whether in orcs or in humans, has its root not in an inverted morality, which sees bad as good and vise versa, but as a kind of self centredness that sees indeed what is good-like standing by one's comerads and being loyal to one's mates-but is unable to set one's behavior on the right place in this accepted scale...

To summarise: There is in Tolkien's presentation of orcs a quite deliberate realism. Orcish behavior is human behavior, and their inability to judge their actions by their own moral criteria is a problem all too sadly familiar."


That's about as much as I could find that's relevant....interesting take on things