Canonical Gradings of Monads

Abstract: We define a notion of grading of a monoid T in a monoidal category C, relative to a class of morphisms M (which provide a notion of M-subobject). We show that, under reasonable conditions (including that M forms a factorization system), there is a canonical grading of T. Our application is to graded monads and models of computational effects. We demonstrate our results by characterizing the canonical gradings of a number of monads, for which C is endofunctors with composition. We also show that we can obtain canonical grades for algebraic operations.