Morita contexts as lax functors

Abstract

Monads are well known to be equivalent to lax functors out of the terminal category. Morita contexts are here shown to be lax functors out of the chaotic category with two objects. This allows various aspects in the theory of Morita contexts to be seen as special cases of general results about lax functors. The account we give of this could serve as an introduction to lax functors for those familiar with the theory of monads. We also prove some very general results along these lines relative to a given 2-comonad, with the classical case of ordinary monad theory amounting to the case of the identity comonad on Cat.