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 A I ⊆ I A. 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 ') < d(a) for all b ∈ X. We show that if the centralizer C of B in A is an A-simple ring, every intersection of C with an ideal of A is A-invariant, A C A = A and there is a degree map for A/B, then A is simple. We apply these results to various types of graded and filtered rings, such as skew group rings, Ore extensions and Cayley-Dickson doublings. © 2013 Elsevier Inc.