>Putting aside the challenges of defining and measuring general intelligence, is it amoral to desire or take action to bring about a smarter child?

Putting it aside - no. Having it in the equation, I don't necessarily think so but I can see how someone might because , as said, the way to define intelligence is not sure and someone is making the decision as to how it is being defined.

>For what it is worth, at least one commercial service is already available in the USA to screen embryos for non-disease genes which are probabilisticlly linked to lower IQ, by whatever metric the companies use to measure and define IQ

So, it might be bad this because obviously the parents are unlikely to have the resources to determine what measure to use, they just have to assume the company's measure is a good one. Just like the police have no way of determining if the face recognition algorithm in their new machine learning toolkit is a good one so they trust the company that tells them it will help catch criminals.

>s your point that the technology isn’t mature enough to be ethical. Or is it that it IS ethical, just not practical?

I think that it might have unethical results as a side effect - a la the machine learning facial recognition example, or less likely even unethical motivations (because who knows if a company doing this stuff can also have ulterior motives)

But returning to >is it amoral to desire or take action to bring about a smarter child?

As a general principle no - but no general principle ever exists, the principle needs an actual implementation. Many of the processes that have been done by parents over generations to attempt to bring about smarter children can be pointed to and decried, even considered immoral.

>Parents Intentionally optimize for smart children over dumb ones all the time using non-genetic means

Sure, and lots of the things that are done people point at and say that is awful! I'm not saying that maximizing genes for intelligence IS awful, only it might be, especially given we don't really know or agree overall what it is we're measuring.

It seems like we have a pretty similar assessment. I was aware of the challenges around definition and implementation, but you raise a really good points about trust and transparency that I had not considered.

While parents can reasonably see and understand the cognitive impacts that health, nutrition, and environmental enrichment have on their kids, this is not the case for genetic modifications, and this could be a meaningful distinction.