What is the intelligibility objection to libertarian free will?

The intelligibility objection is a significant challenge to libertarianism, the philosophical view that the universe is indeterministic and that humans possess free will.

The core of the objection is that individuals can have no more control over a purely random or indeterministic action than they have over an action that is deterministically inevitable. Because free will requires a degree of control that is absent in both cases, critics argue that if human actions are merely the result of indeterminism (chance), then free will cannot exist.12

In essence, the objection posits that randomness does not provide the necessary foundation for agency or moral responsibility. While some philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, attempted to address this by proposing a dualism where reason operates independently of the causal order, and others like Roderick Chisholm introduced "agent-causation" theories, these responses have faced persistent criticism for failing to provide a clear, coherent explanation of how such freedom is actually possible.1