Simple rings and degree maps

For an extension A/B of neither necessarily associative nor necessarily unital rings, we investigate the connection between simplicity of A with a property that we call A-simplicity of B. By this we mean that there is no non-trivial ideal I of B being A-invariant, that is satisfying AI⊆IA. We show that A-simplicity of B is a necessary condition for simplicity of A for a large class of ring extensions when B is a direct summand of A. To obtain sufficient conditions for simplicity of A, we introduce the concept of a degree map for A/B. By this we mean a map d from A to the set of non-negative integers satisfying the following two conditions: (d1) if a∈A, then d(a)=0 if and only if a=0; (d2) there is a subset X of B generating B as a ring such that for each non-zero ideal I of A and each non-zero a∈I there is a non-zero a′∈I with d(a′)⩽d(a) and d(a′b−ba′)