That position has been repeatedly subjected to oversimplification and misrepresentation.
Weberian value-neutrality requires that the social scientist avoid
the stance and the presumption of being a preacher or prophet, declaiming
with alleged expertise about the ultimate goals and goods of life; but Weberian
value-neutrality does not entail, and cannot entail consistently with all else in
Weber, explaining behavior in terms of subjective meanings and modes of rationality without thereby also evaluating these. That unavoidability is signaled
by the dual character of ascriptions of rationality: both explaining behavior
and also evaluating it as regards its intelligibility or appropriateness (always
of course from some point of view). But even if the term “rationality,” or a
synonym for it, is not employed, the twin tasks it signifies are entailed for
the theorist, who must “make sense” of what agents do or show why and how
that is not possible on their terms (cf. MacIntyre 1978). It is worth stressing
here that Weber has often been criticized for not seeing the very thing he at
core recognizes: that rationality, above all instrumental rationality as one
way of making sense, can contain and conceal questionable assumptions
which the theorist of these matters should bring out.