A point that never came up in my history courses in school was the justification for the Union to go to war outside of "you cant secede just so you can have the laws you want". It would seem to me that there had to be some direct threat to the North for them to be willing to shed so much blood. But then again this is America and having a reason doesnt seem to be required.
No.
The closest they came was 1) recognizing the alleged Confederate statehood of Kentucky and Missouri, and 2), making a referendum on secession in Maryland one of their peace terms. All of the above were slave states with significant pro-Confederate elements, so the South didn't frame itself as pushing for the outright conquest of Northern territory.
The contrasting war aims of the Union and Confederacy were on the minds of many southerners throughout the war, and it's part of why they considered their cause morally superior. They could not understand what kind of hateful malice would drive so many Northerners to die in an attempt to conquer a people who posed no threat to them. They felt they had a right of national self-determination, and a Constitutional right to resume the powers delegated to the United States in the Constitution. They felt the North had violated the implicit compact that the President had to represent the whole country in electing a president explicitly opposed to the South's defining institution of slavery.
Conversely, the Northern cause was essentially conservative; the Founding Fathers had given them the Union, and they owed it to their progenitors and progeny alike to preserve it. More philosophically, it was not just about preserving this particular united republic, but republics themselves. The mid 19th century was not quite a high water mark for democracy; most of the 1848 revolutions failed, and the French Republic that did emerge was swiftly replaced with another Bonaparte empire. Secession threatened the very idea of a republic; if a republic couldn't prevent a side that lost a fair election from tearing the country in half, it would prove that people cannot govern themselves, and that republics were an absurdity.