1. Do you think bus drivers should be able to take time off in return for being spit at? If so, how long do you think they should have?

2. People react differently to stressful situations. One of the flight attendants on US Airways Flight 1549 that Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger landed on the Hudson River has not been able to go back to work three years after the incident. Yet her two fellow flight attendants have. How do you judge ethical responsibilities and develop policy in situations where different people react differently?

3. What ethical responsibility does New York City’s Transit Authority have toward its bus drivers?

How would you like to be spat at? The answer to that question is pretty obvious, but what may surprise you is that spit is an occupational hazard of New York City bus drivers. The outcomes of these incidents are even more interesting.

In a typical one-year period, roughly 80 New York City bus drivers are spat upon by disgruntled passengers. These spitting incidents (no other injury was involved) generate an average of 64 days off work—the equivalent of three months’ pay. In 2009, one spat-upon driver took 191 days of paid leave. The union representing the bus drivers said the leave was justified because being spat upon “is a physically and psychologically traumatic experience.”

The causes of passenger spitting are varied, ranging from the MetroCard not working to perceived delays in schedules.

Driver Raul Morales was spat upon by a passenger irate over the fare. After the incident, Morales stopped at a nearby McDonald’s, cleaned himself off, then finished his shift. “I just kept on going,” he says.

As any watcher of the TV series World’s Toughest Jobs knows, there is a lot of dangerous work out there, and bus drivers face their own hazards. Some bus drivers have been assaulted by passengers, including one New York City bus driver who was stabbed to death by a passenger in 2008.

Nancy Shevell, chairwoman of the New York City transit authority, questions whether the time off is justified by the injury. “You have to wonder if you can go home and shower off, take a nap, take off the rest of the day and maybe the next day,” she said. “When it gets strung out over months, you start to wonder.”