After researching for years the law and ethics of robotic systems in the security sector, that is, defense, law enforcement, and disaster relief, we present a set of eight recommendations bearing on human–robot interaction. These recommendations should guide developers, lawyers, ethicists, and policymakers who navigate a highly technical and dynamic field. Our eight recommendations boil down to the following: In circumstances where technology develops rapidly while normative discussions fail to keep up and uncertainty prevails, we suggest a pragmatic, practical, and dynamic form of applied ethics to those involved with robotics – an ethics that eschews high politics at first, but ultimately produces experience that can be fed back into higher-level normative discussions on robots and technology more generally and thus move them forward.