Meta tags won't hurt you in the search engine rankings, just make sure you use them to accurately describe your site (the purpose for which they were originally intended). The major search engines quit using them for indexing purposes years ago due to spamming, but certain tags are still used to supplement other data on your site. For example: language, viewport, title, description etc.
In addition, social networking sites will often use meta tag data from your site...Facebook's Open Graph is a great example of why you should still use meta tags:
http://davidwalsh.name/facebook-meta-tags
FWIW, I have always used them and still do.