...and Gandalf suddenly had a brilliant idea of how to win the war.

[davem]

Originally Posted by SpM

You place great emphasis on the word "their", but I think that the problem can be resolved by viewing their cause and their means as distinct. Their cause was right but their (hypothetical) means would have been wrong. I may be wrong in my interpretation of the statement, but we cannot know for sure.

I'm not sure we can draw this kind of distinction between their cause & their means. If they had employed the methods Tolkien is describing they would, to my mind, have been motivated by a different 'cause'. Their 'cause' would have been merely the defeat of Sauron by whatever means. The end of that road would inevitably have been the use of the Ring, if the ultimate & total defeat of Sauron would have required that.

I don't think that was their true cause. They were motivated niot by what they were fighting against, but by what they were fighting for. For the West it was never a question of merely defeating Sauron. They were struggling (consciously or unconsciously) against the 'wrongness' they percieved in Arda. They had a vision (or at least a sense) of how the world should be. And that vision or 'sense' did not include orcs at all.

To employ orcs to achieve their ends would have been equivalent to them using the Ring itself - just on a smaller scale. Using orcs, like using the Ring, would have made them no different than Sauron. We could even speculate on whether if they had defeated Sauron and destroyed the Ring they wouldn't eventually have gone on & created their own equivalent of it, because they would have adopted a 'Sauronian' mindset.

Originally Posted by The Phantom

There are two bad guys. They kidnap your daughter (if you don't have one- pick someone very dear to you). They plan on torturing her for a week and then executing her. You somehow capture one of the men. He refuses to tell you where she is being held.

How far would you go to get him to talk? What would you do to save the life of the person who is most precious to you?

This is an excellent illustration of how behavior does not always stand alone. Circumstances and consequences play a role.

Yes they do, & in that position (wildly hypothetical as it may be) I may do extreme things to get the information I needed. But that's not the point. I may use torture to find out where they were holding my child, but if I did I would be wrong. I would be no different to the kidnappers - like them I would be using torture to get what I wanted.

But I'm not sure your analogy works in the context of this discussion. The fate of my child is not the fate of the world. Essentially the West is fighting a moral battle against 'Evil' itself. To adopt the methods of 'Evil' is to lose before you start. 'Good' wins out in the end because it is 'Good', not because it is more powerful than 'Evil'. We side with the West because they are in the right. Its not just their cause, but the means they employ in carrying it out that makes them 'heroes'. This is not a war of handsome heroes vs ugly monsters. Its a war of Good vs Evil, Right vs Wrong.

As Brian Rosebury has pointed out, in LotR its essential that Evil brings about its own fall through the very means it chooses to employ - cruelty, malice, treachery, lack of trust & wanton destruction are what bring about Mordor's ultimate defeat. Sauron & Saruman destroy themselves through the means they employ to achieve their cause. Let's not forget that Saruman wanted order & peace - just on his own terms. How far had he actually strayed from the mission he was sent to perform? How far (in his own mind at least) had he lost sight of his cause? Actually, what he seems to have done is to use orcs in order to achieve what he had been sent to Middle earth to do.

So even if in desperation ‘the West’ had bred or hired hordes of orcs and had cruelly ravaged the lands of other Men as allies of Sauron, or merely to prevent them from aiding him, their Cause would have remained indefeasibly right.

How is that different from what Saruman did?