Something has been bugging me for a while. What makes the Uruks and Orcs and Goblins evil? What is it that sets them apart from those who are overfond of war?
Something has been bugging me for a while. What makes the Uruks and Orcs and Goblins evil? What is it that sets them apart from those who are overfond of war?
I believe that unlike other races such as elves, dwarves, men, etc., orcs and goblins don’t have souls, much like animals. Just as a wolf has no qualms about killing a helpless young animal, so do orcs and goblins have no moral qualms about the atrocities they commit. That’s just my personal opinion about it though.
But wolves are not evil.
Yeah, I would say orcs and goblins and such are better described as feral than evil.
That does make sense. The only problem is that how would the atrocities the Uruks commit help them survive? With wild animals their actions usually have some benefit for themselves and their survival even if its not obvious. Though that's not always the case sometimes animals do things that aren't at all beneficial to them.
Also Uruks are known to be intelligent and sapient unlike most wild animals.
I think the notion of being evil is itself kind of hard to describe because it’s about the absence of humanity or a good conscience to influence your actions. And for us humans and the other human-based races, we have the ability to choose, we have a dual-thing going on: a good conscience, but also the other side - desires that could be deemed evil, things like bloodlust or hatred or greed. To be purely evil, you have to be wholly spurred by these desires without the other side, the good conscience, that would give you at least some humanity. But this would have to mean that somehow you still understood the notion of an ‘evil’ deed (in order to choose to commit it) while not having a good conscience, which to me is a hard concept to fathom but I guess this is what the orcs et al. are, because they set out to do evil deeds, yet possess no conscience. It could be that they are simply mindless, but this is different to evil, and would make them more puppets to Sauron than actual sentient beings. i think what separates this from the wolf situation is that for the wolf, the kill is not at all spurred by any notion of ‘soul’ (not saying they don’t have any!) - it is instead spurred by the primal instinct in all living things with a brain to survive, which is entirely separate from a choice influenced by our souls. Thus the wolf is neither mindless nor evil, just animal.
Yeah I would guess that Uruks are driven soley by their bloodlust, hatred and greed and have no conscience at all. And given the Shadow of War game, which I know is non-canon it suggests that Uruks are not mindless as some can resist the main character's attempts to enthrall them in their service.
@ARoyalPrincess it is certainly true that they are evil because of Morgoth (well that is one of many reasons) but i do not believe that the word 'created' should be used there. The Valar have limited power and Morgoth spent most of his just destroying other things. He did not have enough left to create a race so he instead corrupted Elves. I think that this is a key difference as creation is a much, much bigger task.
@Hulk10, this is a question well worth asking! Here's a video that I hope and answers your question. It discusses the topic of good orcs. If orcs had the capability of being good then they would have a conscience to choose what is right and wrong. The good orcs would choose what is right and those that were bad would choose what is wrong. Then they would technically have no trait that made them evil. If they were corrupted elves, we know that the race of elves has no evil trait and so would the orcs, but since they would already be corrupted they would tend towards evil. Since Tolkien had multiple ideas about the origins of orcs, we can never answer this question for certain, because it would be different depending on whether they were animals or sentient creatures. Hope this helps!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QPZlEO-T8Tc
Hmm yes thank you. I was thinking about with an eye to have an naturally evil race for a crossover between Paolini's Inheritance. But not a race that can never have good individuals.
And that video did answer my question sort of. Also so does Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War.
Great! Glad it helped!
What do you think?